Employing Pre-reading Strategies in Enhancing Third Year College Students' Understanding of Poetry | ||
| Al-Bahith Journal | ||
| Article 1, Volume 6, Issue 17, October 2016, Pages 6-16 PDF (0 K) | ||
| Authors | ||
| Dr. Haider kadhim Khudhier; Nadia Majeed Hussein | ||
| Abstract | ||
| are often found to have difficulties in understanding the meaning of poetic texts . This may be attributed to the fact they do not match the new information with the one existing in their minds. Hence , it seems necessary to dig in the strategies that can be employed to enhance understanding and comprehending of poetic texts as taught in the third year stage , College of Education/ Ibn Rushd , Department of English. This paper tends to explore the effect of using pre-reading strategies ( such as: word splash, key words , pre-write questions , storyimpression , pictures , do-now , think-pair- share , KWL chart and I-search )on the college students' understanding of poetry. Sixty students are selected to be the sample of the study ,divided into two equal groups : 30 representing the experimental ( following the pre-reading strategies in teaching poetry) and 30 representing the control ( following the traditional way of teaching poetry) . After conducting the process of equalizing these groups in terms of factors such as age , sex , level of parents' education , it has been found that students of experimental group perform better in activities related to comprehending poetic texts . The pre-reading strategies motivate students to be enthusiastically engaged in problems of interpreting and explaining the meaning of poetry. Moreover , they appear to be more active and ready to solve problems of Staiger ( 1973:37 ) contends that reading is essentially a cognitive process "during which the reader not only comprehends ideas found in a text but also interprets and evaluates them. Expressed another way, reading is the most crucial of the four language skills comprehending poetr 1.0 Introduction for EFL learners ,as it enables them to gain exposure to the target language and receive valuable linguistic input to build language proficiency. Readers often need to go through an active process rather than simply decoding the graphic representation . For this, Anderson (1999:1) states that : Reading is an active, fluent process which involves the reader and the reading material in building meaning. Meaning does not reside on the printed page ,synergy occurs in reading which combines the words on the printed page with the reader's background knowledge and experiences. In the same vein, Ur ( 1996: 138 ) argues that reading means reading and understanding . Reading the words, not knowing what they mean, merely indicates decoding ( translating written symbols into corresponding sounds ) . To give a finer explanation, he ( ibid ) affirms that reading implies the following tips : 1- perceiving and decoding letters in order to read words, 2- understanding all the words in order to understood the meaning of a text, 3- gathering meaning from what is read, and 4- understanding of a text by understanding the words it composed. In brief, reading can mostly be viewed as the translation of graphic symbols into their corresponding meaning whether spoken or written. Most definitions of reading seem to be based on the idea that comprehension is the essence of reading, without which no reading can take place. In this connection, this paper intends to investigate the application of pre-reading strategies to enhance understanding poetry of the third year classes. | ||
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