Authors:
Breukink, Corina, corina.breukink@hu.nl, University of Applied Sciences Utrecht
Keywords: reading comprehension, reading process, response process, eyetracking, secondary school students, poetry, prose
Abstract:
Using four reading comprehension tasks for poetry and four for prose (two expository texts and two short stories), possible differences between reading and response processes for poetry and prose were examined via eye movement registrations. The reading tasks were followed by stimulated retrospective interviews. Participants were 38 Dutch pre-university / higher general students in grade 8, 10 and 12. First, the time spent by students reading a line of text (Area of Interest, AOI) before a question was examined. Two types of reading measures were used: first pass first gaze or First Reading Time (FRT), which indicates the extent to which explicit text content (text base) is processed, and Total Reading Time (TRT), the total time spent looking in an AOI, making this reading measure indicative of situation modeling. Across all grade levels, FRT for the reading process appears to differ little between poetry and prose. For a first time, students primarily read a poetry or a prose text quickly and superficially. In contrast, the TRT for the reading process shows significant differences between poetry and prose: students require more time to construct a situation model of a poetry text compared to a prose text. Furthermore, for the TRT, a significant difference has been demonstrated between the 8th and 12th grade for reading poetry and prose; the 10th grade scores fall between these two extremes. Secondly, the TRT for the response process was examined. We found evidence that students read a text AOI significantly longer after reading a poetry question than after reading a prose question: the TRT for a text-after-question poetry AOI is significantly longer than for a text-after-question prose AOI. In addition, the reading process, as measured, does not appear to be related to answering text comprehension questions; no difference can be demonstrated in the reading process of students who answer a question correctly and students who answer a question incorrectly. Students at all grade levels reported not only that they experienced poetry as harder than prose, but also that the questions accompanying the poetry texts were more difficult than the questions accompanying the prose texts.