Comprehension Strategies of Literary Engagement: A Study of Adolescent Readers.

A study determined what comprehension strategies either contributed to literary engagement or inhibited engagement among adolescents. Subjects, 25 eleventh-grade students chosen at random from two heterogenous English classes in a suburban school, read two short stories and reported their thinking and understanding as they were reading. Transcripts of the think-aloud protocols were analyzed. Results indicated that: (1) 7 of the readers were engaged on both stories, 7 were not engaged on either, and the remaining 11 were engaged with one story but not the other; (2) difficulty of the story had a strong effect on engagement; (3) subjects' self-ratings of their usual story engagement, their measured engagement, and their teachers' ratings did not correspond very well; (4) both engaged and nonengaged readers tended to use the same strategies; and (5) there was a wide variability of strategy use among readers. Findings suggest that teachers need to provide strategy instruction for all students with the suggestion that students need to experiment and discover which strategies work best for them. (A figure of reading survey questions and 5 tables of data are included; 29 references are attached.) (RS) *********************************************************************** Reproductions supplied by EDRS are the best that can be made from the original document. *********************************************************************** COMPREHENSION STRATEGIES OF LITERARY ENGAGEMENT: A STUDY OF ADOLESCENT READERS "PERMISSION TO REPRODUCE THIS MATE IAL HAS BEEN GRANTED BY Jd 1/ TO THE EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES INFORMATION CENTER (ERIC). " U.S. DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION Office of Educational Research and Improvement EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES INFORMATION CENTER (ERIC) 'This document has been reproduced as received from the person or organization onoinahno . t 0 Minor changes have been made to improve reproduction Quality Pomts of view or opmgons stated in trim dOCuwent do not necessanly rLuresent official OE RI postion or pohcy Sharon B. Kletzien West Chester University West Chester, PA 19383 (215) 436-2877 FAX (215) 328-2805 B itnet: SKLETZI E@WCU Sharon J. Taylor Springfield School District Springfield, PA 19064 (215) 690-1752 Paper presented at the National Reading Conference December 3, 1992 San Antonio, Texas BEST COPY AVAILABLE 2 COMPREHENSION STRATEGIES OF LITERARY ENGAGEMENT: A STUDY OF ADOLESCENT READERS This study is an exploration of strategy use among adolescents who become engaged with short stories and adolescents who do not make that engagement. The purposes of this study are to determine what comprehension strategies seem either to contribute to engagement or to inhibit engagement among these students. In addition, other possible contributing factors, such as student, parental and peer interest in reading, are examined. Although English teachers and researchers have always been concerned about students' understanding of literature, within the past decade there has been renewed effort to understand the reasoning and strategic processing that accompanies constructing meaning from text. Most theorists and researchers now view the reading process as "transactional" in nature (Beach & Hynds, 1991). Within the transactional theory the reader is not seen as a separate entity, acting upon the text, nor the text as acting upon the reader, but both as parts or aspects of a total event (Rosenblatt, 1985). The reader both changes and is changed by the meaning created from the text. Many earlier studies of literary responses focused on the content of individual reader's responses to various genre (Applebee, 1978). Readers' ability to interpret stories and to respond personally to them were explored. Purves (1973) found that girls were more likely to express involvement in a story than boys. Purves also noted that older students tend to give more interpretive responses than younger students, a finding corroborated by Bunbury (1985). Recent research has often focused on the reader's stance or orientation to the text. Rosenblatt (1978) classified the reading act as falling somewhere on a continuum between predominantly efferent reading (seeking to obtain knowledge) to predominantly aesthetic (reading for appreciation and the literary experience). There appears to be a strong correlation between aesthetic stance and higher levels of personal understanding (Cox & Many, 1989; Many, 1990, 1991). Vipond and Hunt (1984), in exploring readers' orientation to texts, identified three possible stances: information-driven (similar to Rosenblatt's efferent reading), story-driven (similar to aesthetic reading) or point-driven, attempting to infer the author's theme. They found that most readers exhibited information-driven or story-driven orientations. Langer (1990) identified four recursive stances that readers take in relation to the text: being out and stepping into an envisionment, being in and moving through an envisionment, stepping back and rethinking what one knows, and stepping out and objectifying the experience. Langer found that all subjects in her study, average, aboveand below-average, exhibited all four stances. Purcell-Gates (1991) used Langer's categories to look at remedial readers' attempts to read short stories. She found that the remedial readers spent a disproportionate amount of time being out of an envisionment and attempting to step into one. Garrison and Hynds (1991) examined proficient and less proficient readers' use of personal evocations and reflections while reading four short stories. They found that proficient readers used personal experience to help them understand the text whereas less proficient readers appeared to use their prior experiences to draw away from the text. Different readers may react to literary text in idiosyncratic ways (Golden & Guthrie, 1986; Lehr, 1988); however, Purves (1985) suggests that a Comprehension Strategies 3 study of the patterns of response will yield valuable insights into text factors and reader factors that influence reader response. Paralleling this research into readers' responses to literature has been an interest in comprehension strategy use (Baker & Brown, 1984a; Paris, Lipson & Wixson, 1983). Many studies have suggested that good readers have greater knowledge and/or control of comprehension strategies than do poor readers (Gambrell & Heathington, 1981; Hare & Pulliam, 1980; Kletzien, 1991; Olshaysky, 1976-77; Zabrucky & Ratner, 1989). Particular strategies that seem to contribute to greater comprehension have been identified and taught to students with positive results (Dole, Duffy, Roehler, & Pearson, 1991; Meyer, Brandt, & Bluth, 1980; Palincsar & Brown, 1985; Pressley, Johnson, Symons, McGoldrick, & Kurita, 1989). Beach and Appleman (1984) suggest that readers may use different strategies for expository and literary text types; however, strategy researchers have used both types of text for their studies, and clear differences have not been reported. This study is based on both the reader response research and the comprehension strategy use research. It seems plausible to assume that readers who differ in their engagement with a story may use different strategies in constructing meaning. In this study, an attempt is made to distinguish patterns of strategies used by the readers who are able to "move through an envisionment" (engaged readers) to those used by the readers who "spend a disproportionate amount of time being out of an envisionment" (nonengaged readers).