Novices who have had poetry instruction have internalized Culler's general conventions for poetry as discourse: significance, thematic unity, and metaphorical coherence.¶

Claim · All claims
Evidence · 1 study · qualitative r3 · q2
Currency · newest study 1998 · not yet checked against its sources · not reviewed by a person

Subclaims¶

q2 i? Novices anticipated that the poet was expressing a significant attitude, that the point would unify all propositions, and that metaphor is central to poetic expression, as Culler predicted. → Peskin 1998

Evidence¶

Peskin 1998¶

Peskin, J. (1998). Constructing meaning when reading poetry: An expert-novice study. Cognition and Instruction, 16(3), 235-263. https://doi.org/10.1207/s1532690xci1603_1

q2 · i? · qualitative · r3

Protocol analysis of the same think-aloud expert-novice study, coded against Culler's three conventions. The General Discussion reports: "As Culler had predicted, they clearly anticipated that the poet was intending to express a significant attitude or make a point."

"As Culler had predicted, they clearly anticipated that the poet was intending to express a significant attitude or make a point; that this point would function as a central unifying element to which all the propositions would relate; and that metaphor is important in poetic expression."

Discussion¶

Learner Variables¶

• Prior Knowledge — outcome: instruction changes it

Related Claims¶

• In reading textually constrained period poetry, experts' organized domain knowledge (schemata) is the major factor differentiating them from novices, enabling allusion, contextualization and anticipation. — related
• When experts cannot make clear sense of a passage, they shift from constructing what the poem says to how the poet is saying it, treating obscurity as deliberate. — related
• Experts employed productive interpretive strategies in making poems coherent — using structure, binary oppositions, wordplay, rhythm and rhyme as cues, and scanning to contextualize — which novices used minimally. — related
• Experts expressed greater appreciation of the poems and their specific images, while novices very frequently expressed interpretive frustration and dissatisfaction. — related
• Metaphoric competence is proposed to be central to all aspects of language use, including grammatical and sociolinguistic competence — related
• Attending to a poem's title as a structural cue was evident in novice but not expert protocols, and the title jolted a novice into revising a misinterpretation. — related
• Experts spent much longer on each poem and produced longer protocols than novices, because for experts finding a meaningful pattern was only the starting point for higher-level analysis. — related