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Fostering symbolic interpretation

Peskin, J. and Wells-Jopling, R. (2012). Fostering symbolic interpretation during adolescence. Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology, 33(1),13-23.

AbstractAlthough by 11 years children demonstrate impressive performance on various tasks that assess symbolic thinking in language development, research suggests that few young adolescents demonstrate evidence of symbolic processing when reading literature. This study investigated whether the difficulty might be due to a lack of adequate exposure to domain-specific knowledge. Students in the experimental groups in three age groups - preadolescence, middle adolescence and later adolescence - received concrete scaffolds designed to foster domain-specific knowledge of the symbolic process. A comparison of the experimental and control groups showed that students at all three ages who had experienced the scaffolds demonstrated significantly greater symbolic interpretation. Furthermore, despite concerns that the scaffolds might dampen the readers’ personal response, the experimental groups at all three ages provided significantly higher enjoyment ratings of the test poems.

Keywords: adolescence; symbolic interpretation; domain-specific knowledge; poetry; concrete scaffolds; computational skills

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Fostering symbolic interpretation during adolescenceAlthough the language of poetic expression is highly symbolic (Gibbs, 1994), in a recent study

on the interpretation of poetry during the school years, Peskin (2010) found that 8th graders did not demonstrate greater symbolic interpretation of poetic texts than the 4th graders in the study. Similarly, Harker (1994) described how 10th graders essentially gave prose translations of a poem’s literal meanings rather than exploring the imaginative symbolic possibilities; and Svensson (1987) who provided students with poems rich in symbolism, found that only 8% of responses of 11-year-olds, 18% of responses of 14-year-olds, and 42% of responses of 18-year-olds at vocational and academic schools provided even partly symbolic interpretations of poems. The major purpose of the present study is to investigate whether the difficulty might be a lack of domain-specific knowledge: Will an intervention that targets the knowledge required for symbolic interpretation improve adolescent performance at three age-points, pre-adolescence, middle adolescence and later adolescence?

Conceptual metaphors are so pervasive in human language that we are virtually unaware of their metaphorical character or even their existence (Johnson, 1991). For instance, in the conceptual metaphor, “People are plants,” people are understood metaphorically in terms of the life cycle of plants, as “in full bloom” or “withering away” (Crisp, 2003; Lakoff & Turner, 1989; Turner, 1991; Winner, McCarthy & Gardner, 1980). Even children easily understand many conceptual metaphors, for instance, “Good is up” and “Bad is down,” resulting in everyday expressions such as “I am over the moon” or “I’m really down in the dumps.” Johnson & Lakoff (2002) explain this ease in terms of “embodied realism” which holds that as humans have the same kinds of bodies and environments they have shared image schemas. Unlike the processing of a conceptual metaphor which appears to be largely unconscious, the processing of literary symbolism appears to be an intentionally selected, conscious and effortful literary strategy (Gibbs, 1996; Steen, 1989). However, as creative literary metaphors are often novel variants of common conceptual metaphors it is somewhat of a mystery why adolescents have such difficulty with symbolic thinking when reading literature, and in particular, poetry.Development of an Understanding of Non-literal Language

Symbolic thinking emerges in linguistic expression at 18 to 24 months with the representation of objects, events or activities by means of words (Fischer & Bidell, 1998). In the preschool years there is a further development with the understanding and production of visual image metaphors, which involve the appreciation of similarities between very different domains of knowledge, as in a comment such as, “the chimney is a house-hat” (Billow, 1981; Harris, 1982; Winner, McCarthy & Gardner, 1980).

After about four years of age children begin to develop a metacognitive awareness of non-literal language as they become able to distinguish “what is said” and “what is meant,” (Lee, Torrance, & Olson, 2001; Robinson et al, 1983; Torrance & Olson, 1985). For instance, they appreciate that a listener will find the request for a “blue flower” ambiguous if there is both a small and a large, blue flower (Peskin & Olson, 2004; Ruffman et al, 1990). This distinction is conceptually congruent with children’s new found ability to represent other people’s mental states, or what is called theory of mind: Theory of mind tasks (which involve thinking about someone’s ignorance of something that the child knows to be true) as well as say-mean tasks (which involve thinking about what someone both said and meant) are dependent on children’s recently established ability to co-ordinate two different representations or perspectives.

The say-mean distinction is the cognitive underpinning in the comprehension of non-literal language, including jokes, riddles, and sayings such as, “Don’t change horses midstream.” Although prior to age 7 children will process the language of idioms and metaphors literally, by 9 years of age research using various task factors suggests that children show an impressive understanding of figurative modes of thought (Berman & Ravid, 2010; Cacciari & Levorato, 1989; Gibbs, 1994; 1996; Vosniadou,

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1987). At around 11 years of age pre-adolescents comprehend metaphors that are based on abstract relations (Billow, 1975; Gentner, 1988). However, the ability to use figurative language in a creative way is still fairly undeveloped at the age of 11 (Levorato & Cacciari, 2002), and like the symbolic processing of poetry continues to develop through adolescence. Domain-Specific Knowledge in the Development of Symbolic Interpretation

An important question in applied developmental psychology, as it has huge import for pedagogy, is whether adolescent difficulties with symbolic thinking in literary reading might be a result of a lack of exposure to a field of knowledge or whether there is a fixed neural timetable such that teachers might need to wait (Byrnes, 2007) before expecting children to engage in symbolic interpretation when reading literature. Domains are recognized bodies of subject matter knowledge which are structured around concepts that are core to these fields (Alexander, 1997). Research in various domains has allowed for the identification of domain-specific strategies or heuristics (e.g., Peskin, 1998; Wineburg, 1991), and it has been argued that domain-specific knowledge acquisition is the greatest contributor to proficiency in any domain (Ericsson, 2006; Feigenbaum, 1989; Minsky & Papert, 1974). Deep structures of knowledge, or schemata, enable experts to see meaningful patterns. The corollary is that a lack of such knowledge is the primary handicap for novice literary readers (Hall, 2005). It has been suggested that adolescent difficulties with literary symbolism might be a result of deficits in literary education (Pirie, 2002; Smith & Wilhelm, 2004; 2006).

Most of the symbolism involved in poetry involves metaphor (Gibbs, 1994), and processing a creative literary metaphor is thought to involve a mapping of two different conceptual domains: the symbolic element, also called the “source” or “vehicle” (Richards, 1936) which is always expressed in the text, and the particular underlying topic, also called the target, which is what the symbol is about and may not be explicit in the text (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980). For instance, in the few lines of a poem translated from Swedish (Svensson, 1987, p. 503), “It is this persistent wind/ It just gets stronger// One after the other the old trees fall/ here in the garden// before the fruit has had time to/ ripen,” a young reader might see the poem as ultimately about trees falling. More experienced readers of poetry, however, assume that a seemingly banal poem will mean more than may be apparent in the mere lexical definitions of the words (Groeben & Schreier, 1998). These readers are likely to provide more creative, and often personal, symbolic interpretations, such as people dying before fulfilling their goals; or the power of new technologies; or perhaps life forces destroying the creative process. Expecting the poem to involve “polyvalence” or multiple meanings (Schmidt, 1989), such a reader examines which parts of the poem might be taken as symbolic. These underlying assumptions are part of the domain-specific knowledge required for literary symbolic interpretation.

Further, domain knowledge in symbolic interpretation involves the “grammar” of symbols that recur frequently in literature (e.g. Frye, 1994). Frye argued that “poems are made out of the same images, just as poems in English are all made out of the same language,” (Frye, 1994, p. 275). The fundamental structure of these symbols or archetypes involves the parallels between the cycles of human life and the cycles of the world. Once similarities between, for instance, the cycle of Spring to Winter and the human cycle of birth to death are perceived, symbolic interpretation has occurred.

The absence of such knowledge in the adolescents’ literary reading repertoire could substantially impede progress in arriving at symbolic interpretations of poems. It is in this sense that an understanding of symbolism may be said to represent the core domain knowledge present in the reading of poetry. Various genres involve poetic effects such as symbolism, but poetry is the genre where the poetic function “changes from latent to patent and manifests itself most palpably and intensely” (Jakobson, 1960, p. 373). Adolescents’ poor performance in studies on symbolic processing may be because they do not yet have the genre-related expectation that exploring symbolic content enriches one’s reading nor the

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interpretive strategies to do so. Research on the teaching of English has shown the effectiveness of a proactive focus on the knowledge and strategies underlying high literacy (Langer, 2001a, 2001b). This fits well with the theories of developmental psychologists such as Karmiloff-Smith (1992) who claim that only when the representations of concepts and processes become explicit are they accessible to consciousness, verbal articulation, and cognitive control and flexibility.Possible Cognitive Computational Constraints in the Development of Symbolic Interpretation.

For a symbolic construal of a poem, readers need to inhibit their tendency to only focus on what the poem is literally saying, that is, the surface and salient meaning (Gardner, 1975). However, recent neuropsychological work suggests that certain computational processes, such as “inhibiting the salient response” are associated with the prefrontal cortex, the area of the brain involved in executive functions (Rubia, Smith, Brammer, & Taylor, 2003) and that at puberty there is a proliferation of synapses in the prefrontal cortex causing less efficient cognitive functioning (Giedd, Blumenthal, & Jeffries, 1999). Indeed, there are concerns that at 11 to 12 years there is actually a decline in performance on some tasks which involve response inhibition (Blakemore & Choudhury, 2006). Furthermore research on understanding metaphor has recently shown that when participants read novel metaphors, the kind involved in poetry, there is involvement of regions in the prefrontal cortex that overlap with those regions that continue to undergo refinement through adolescence (Lee & Dapretto, 2006; Rapp et al., 2004; Stringaris et al., 2007). If the prefrontal cortex plays such an important role in metaphoric processing, perhaps the young adolescents’ conceptual skills are not yet sufficiently developed to process the complex relations involved in symbolic understanding when reading poetry. Neuro-developmental constraints during the early adolescent years might make symbolic interpretation very difficult to teach.

The first aim of the study will be to examine whether providing the requisite domain-specific knowledge will, indeed, foster symbolic interpretation during adolescence. This will be examined at three age points – preadolescence, middle adolescence and later adolescence. We hypothesized that domain-specific instruction would foster symbolic thinking in the two older age groups but possibly not during preadolescence. With this aim in mind, we planned to expose an experimental group at each of the three ages to domain-specific knowledge and compare their pre- and posttest literary symbolic interpretation skill with a control group at each age, statistically controlling for cognitive computational ability.The Reader-Response/Explicit-Instruction Dichotomy

In any consideration of adolescents’ difficulty with symbolic processing in poetry one must examine a fundamental tension specific to poetry instruction. Because of the aesthetic, personal and emotional nature of poetry, many teachers fear that making explicit the structures and processes of literary symbolism will generate antipathy to literature. They believe that the knowledge needed for effective symbolic interpretation is best acquired tacitly through untutored perception, rather than by making the process explicit (Pirie, 1997; 2002). Dressman and Faust, who recently surveyed more than 600 articles about teaching poetry written primarily by teachers, from 1912 to the present, describe two opposing traditions or approaches that emerged: A “Populist” emphasis on texts to be played with, in which the reader’s personal response is highlighted, but which is frequently seen to be at the expense of critical rigor; versus a “Formalist” emphasis on explicit teaching and critical rigor, which is frequently seen to be at the expense of personal enjoyment (Dressman and Faust, 2007; Faust & Dressman, 2009). In the last quarter century this dichotomy has been most evident in the polarization between what is called structural or textual analysis in instruction (van Schooten & de Glopper, 2003) and reader response theory, which emphasizes how the literary work of art “comes into being through the reader’s attention to what the text activates within

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him” (Rosenblatt, 1985. p. 38). However, this dichotomy in pedagogical approaches to poetry has deep historical roots, summed up by Glicksburg and Gordon’s claim (1939) that “the living poem is often destroyed in the process of salvaging its hidden meaning (p. 550).

In developmental studies of fiction reading, there is some empirical support for teachers’ fears. In a longitudinal study van Schooten and de Glopper (2003) provide some evidence for the negative effect of formal instruction on personal response in reading fiction. Using Miall and Kuiken’s (1995) “Literary Response Questionnaire,” a measure of personal response to literature, van Schooten and de Glopper (2003) showed that literary response decreases with age from 7th to 11th grade, when formal literary instruction is introduced and then intensifies. Furthermore, between grades 7 and 9 teaching methods which emphasize structural analysis have particularly negative effects on various personal responses, e.g., students’ reports of empathy with story characters. Similarly with regard to reading fiction, Greenleaf, Schoenback, Cziko and Mueller (2001) demonstrated that students frequently stop reading for pleasure in middle school and even begin fake “reading” during their silent-reading periods. However, in the reading of poetry, although the dichotomy between formalist and populist pedagogical approaches continues to be a rich area of debate and theoretical discussion, to our knowledge there is no scientific evidence to support the notion that explicit teaching of symbolic processing when reading a poem lowers students’ enjoyment ratings when reading poetry.

The second aim of the present study is to explore whether providing adolescents with the domain-specific knowledge of symbolic interpretation will inhibit students’ literary reading experience, in particular their enjoyment when reading poetry. Based on the evidence from studies on reading fiction we hypothesized that lessons designed to provide explicit knowledge of the symbolic process in poetry might dampen students’ personal responses to the poems.

MethodParticipants

Participants were 137 students from six classes. Table 1 presents age and gender distribution by grade and lesson group.

--------------------------------------Insert Table 1 here-------------------------------------An additional 17 children were excluded from the study: two ESL students and three students

with learning disabilities, as advised by their teachers; and 12 students who were absent for one or more of the testing or lesson sessions. All the grade 9 and 12 participants attended the same high school, and the grade 6 participants attended an elementary school that is a feeder school for the high school. Both schools draw on children from middle-class and upper middle-class neighborhoods in a large Canadian city. The choice of grade 6 as the lowest grade was based on Piagetian and neo-Piagetian notions of the beginning of symbolic thinking at 11 years (Case, 1992; Inhelder & Piaget, 1958) as well as the neurophysiological research on synapse proliferation during puberty and possible performance decline on tasks involving response inhibition (Blakemore & Choudhury, 2006). One of the classes in each grade was randomly assigned to be the experimental group and the other class served as control group. Materials

Test poem selection process. Many poems are narrative or dramatic and may not be rich in symbolism. The poems used in the present study involved invisible symbolism, that is, it was possible to take each poem either in a purely literal manner or to create various imaginative, symbolic construals. If these particular poems are taken literally, though, the meanings would be quite banal. Culler (1994) notes that trained readers expect that a poem should make a point or refer to something beyond itself, so when a poem seems to be platitudinous, the reader asks if this is the entire meaning (Svensson, 1987). Numerous poems, which we chose based on whether they involved invisible symbolism and language suitable for students in 6th to 12th grade, were read by our research group members plus an English

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instructor in the teacher education program, and rated according to “difficulty” (“1 = very easy to 10 = very difficult”), as well as “salience of the symbolic content” (“1 = not very salient to 10 = very salient”). Poems were eliminated if rated as difficult and/or if the symbolic content was not salient. The teacher from each participating 6th grade class then assessed the language of the remaining poems as suitable for their students (in a middle to upper-middle class neighborhood), or if a minimal change to a word could make the text suitable. Although in most disciplines it is unusual to find texts appropriate from Grade 6 to Grade 12, poetry is somewhat different in that it can be interpreted at various levels. As Bruner (1986) noted, literary texts “call upon the reader, in Barthes’ sense, to become a writer, a composer of virtual text in response to the actual” (p. 24) and a simply worded poem may be read literally by some, but also generate sophisticated interpretations when read by others.

Test poems. Five poems were selected for both the pretest and posttest booklets. One of the poems consisted of the first 14 lines of Stephen Spender’s poem “What I Expected” in an anthology for school students (Spender, 1970). In this poem Spender writes poignantly about his life expectations and later disillusionment. He describes how he expected “Thunder, fighting./Long struggles with men/And climbing…Then the rocks would shake.” What he had not anticipated was the “gradual day” weakening one’s will, “Leaking the brightness away,/The lack of good to touch,/The fading of body and soul.” In previous testing we have found that many students look at the surface words “climbing” and “struggles with men,” and interpret the poem as a narrative about climbing a mountain during a battle.

A second poem consisted of the first seven lines of “Washing” by Randall Jarrell (1969), with slight changes, such as replacing the word “abject” with “miserable” so that it was suitable for 6th graders. The remaining three poems adapted from Svensson’s (1987) translations have been provided in Appendix A. Slight changes were made mostly to improve Svensson’s translation, for instance, in “The Light and the Beetle,” “a shadow which he cannot run away from” was changed to “a shadow from which he cannot run.”

As reading poetry is so personal and idiosyncratic, to rule out a possible confound of content (Many, 1991; Purves, 1975) participants were given these five poems both in the pretest and the posttest. Interpreting poetry is somewhat different from other tasks in that there is not a correct or incorrect answer. Indeed, Schmidt’s (1989) “polyvalence” convention suggests that the same reader may provide different interpretations of the same poem at different times. As a check on the reliability of any result from the omnibus test of pretest and posttest skill in interpreting the five selected poems, we provided a sixth poem on the posttest that had not been seen by any of the students before. This poem, called “Poem (As the Cat)” by William Carlos Williams (1998), served as somewhat of a “litmus test” as it was rated by the members of our research group as more difficult to interpret, and having less salient symbolic content, than the other five poems. Like the other five poems it is written in simple language and can be interpreted literally, but also provides an opportunity for a variety of complex, creative and personal interpretations. Measures

The symbolic interpretation task. On both the pretest and posttest the poems were presented in a booklet form, each on a separate page with the question below it, “What do you think this poem is about?” (Eva-Wood, 2004a, 2004b; Svensson, 1987). Space was provided below the poem for the students to respond.

Personal response ratings. On the page immediately after presentation of each poem students were asked to rate their personal response to it. The poem was presented again at the top of the page followed by three 1-10 rating scale items adapted from Levorato and Nemesio (2005) and similar to those used in the Poetry Reception Questionnaire (Hilscher & Cupchik, 2005; Nemesio, Levorato & Ronconi, 2006). In the first item, participants rated their enjoyment of the poem on a number line

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ranging from 0 to 10, with two anchors: “I did not enjoy reading this” as 0, and “I greatly enjoyed reading this” as 10. In the second item, they rated their emotions from 0, “I felt no emotion,” to 10, “I felt a lot of emotion.” The third item assessed the poem’s perceived difficulty, with “I found this very easy” as 0 and “I found this very difficult” as 10. In addition, on the pretest and posttest, students were required to rate how much they enjoyed reading poetry in general.

Computational skills measure. In order to control for the central computational processes - cognitive decoupling, working

memory, and executive functioning - participants completed the Verbal Reasoning subtest of the Canadian Test of Cognitive Skills (CTCS) (Canadian Test Centre, Inc., 1992). Cognitive decoupling and the computation of possible scenarios with the decoupled representations is the core ability measured by cognitive ability tests (Stanovich, 2009). Readers encountering symbolism must imaginatively consider the less salient, symbolic interpretation (i.e., cognitively decouple), holding both representational products in mind and integrating them, a high cognitive-load process involving executive functions and carried out in working memory. There are substantial correlations between cognitive ability tests and working memory (Kane, Hambrick & Conway, 2005) as well as between cognitive ability and executive functioning (Baddeley, 1992; Kane & Engle, 2002). The Verbal Reasoning subtest therefore was used as a proxy to both control for general computational skills as well as to estimate the likely amount of variance in posttest symbolic interpretation due to such computational skills. The disattenuated correlation between the Verbal Reasoning subtest and the full battery CTCS is .95 for the test for 6th graders, 1.00 for the test for 9th graders, and .98 for the 12th graders’ test.

Measures of prior equivalence of lesson groups. To assess equivalence of the control and experimental groups prior to the intervention, in addition to the Symbolic interpretation task and Personal response ratings, students provided their age, gender and the English grade received on their previous report card. The self-report method for the English grades was selected because the school board did not allow the school to provide the information directly to the researchers. Although such self-reports may contain inaccurate information, there was no reason to believe that either lesson group would be more likely than the other to misreport their grade. Design and Procedure

Students in both the experimental and control groups in each of grades 6, 9, and 12 participated in two sessions of testing (pretest and posttest) with a unit on poetry in between, which took approximately two-and-a-half weeks. A teacher from another school carried out the intervention and taught both the experimental and the control group lessons in all three grades. The teacher was chosen because he was considered to be an excellent teacher by his colleagues and had experience teaching English to a wide span of age groups.

The intervention. The aim of this study was not primarily to examine how to teach symbolic interpretation, but rather an attempt to investigate whether one can successfully teach symbolic interpretation explicitly to younger adolescents so as to enhance their ability to explore the imaginative, symbolic possibilities when reading poetry. The symbolism unit was developed by an interdisciplinary three-person team: A professor of developmental psychology, a doctoral student in developmental cognitive science who had previously taught English and French literature, and a highly regarded and experienced English teacher. The unit was based on empirical evidence from developmental science regarding the importance of concrete and visual representations in instruction (e.g., Gerlic & Jausovec, 1999; Marzano, Pickering & Pollock, 2005; Paivio, 1991; Schwartz & Fischer, 2004) and consisted of three concrete scaffolds designed to provide domain-specific knowledge of the process of symbolic interpretation.

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Lesson plans were developed in detail for each lesson within the unit, one set for the control and one for the experimental groups in grades 9 and 12, and another two sets for the 6th graders. There was no reference to any of the test poems during the lessons for either the control or experimental groups. With regard to the two 6th grade classes, efforts were made to keep their lessons as similar as possible to those of the 9th and 12th graders, but a few of the poems were replaced with ones that had more simple vocabulary and more age-relevant content. One of the grade 6 teachers was consulted regarding the suitability of the material. We did not have permission to videotape or audiotape the classes and fidelity of implementation depended on the following: Explicit, detailed lesson plans that the teacher tried out on various groups of students prior to the intervention. An understanding that if any lesson plan were not completed during the intervention the class would be excluded from the study. When this happened with one grade 9 class, another grade 9 class was substituted, given the pretest, and the unit successfully implemented. Finally, as we were concerned about implementation in the Grade 6 classes (as the teacher had experience only from Grade 7 upwards), one researcher observed the teacher in both the Grade 6 experimental and control groups and confirmed that there was adherence to the lesson plans.

A detailed, descriptive report of the three scaffolds and intervention for implementation by teachers can be found in Peskin, Allen, & Wells-Jopling (2010) and a shorter description will be provided below. First, the teacher and each class jointly built up a visual image - called the Cycle-Wheel - of the most frequently recurring metaphors in literary works, what Frye (1994) called the “grammar” of symbols. It demonstrated the cyclical nature of e.g., the seasons as well as the polar phases and oppositions, such as summer and winter or creation and destruction (Friedman, 1972). The second concrete representation, a Venn diagram, was then introduced to make the similarities and differences between the source and target elements visually salient and concrete. For instance, in a poem that used a quilt to symbolize the patchwork nature of a family, students used the overlapping part of the Venn diagram to generate ideas about the commonalities between the source (quilt) and target (family), such as “warmth when cold”; “stitched together”; “may unravel”; “united but separated”; “common goal”; “parts may clash”; “parts may complement one another,” and so on. After working with a few poems focusing on the visual image of Frye’s “grammar” of symbols as well as the possible Venn diagrams that could aid symbolic interpretation, students were introduced to the third concrete representation: two-line image metaphors beginning with Ezra Pound’s (1998) famous couplet-poem “In a station of the metro” in which the first line consists of the target (“The apparition of these faces in a crowd”) and the second line involves symbolic elements to describe these faces emerging from the dark subway (“Petals on a wet black bough”), which is the source component. Other couplets were provided and discussed, e.g. An acrobat hanging from a tightrope/A spider dangling from his thread. Students then wrote a few of their own two-line image metaphors. Later, working in small groups, the students physically separated the two lines of their compositions, scrambled them, and their group’s pile of scrambled strips was given to another group to re-align into couplets. As each group worked on re-aligning their given set of scrambled couplets, discussions of the mapping of source and target domains ensued.

The control group lessons were based on the lessons that this English teacher usually uses to teach his classes but an attempt was made to employ the same instructional strategies as in the lessons for the experimental group (i.e., emotional response, large and small group discussion, writing of short poems, short poem developed into longer poem): In both the experimental and control groups, there was an initial appeal to students’ emotions and an exploration of personal reactions. In the experimental group this was tied to the introduction of the first scaffold, the Cycle Wheel (i.e., emotions were described metaphorically in terms of feeling depressed "downward direction” or happy “upward”) and the notion of loneliness in nature was explored in the poem, “leaf loneliness” by e. e. cummings. This poem was then used to introduce the second scaffold, the Venn diagrams. In the control group the

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introduction to the unit involved discussion of poetry as expressing emotional responses to an interior or exterior landscape. Beginning with an exterior landscape, students’ personal responses to nature and emotive responses of wonder were explored in Raymond Souster’s (1965) poem, "On Georgian Bay" with discussion of poetic techniques such as word sounds and onomatopoeia; repetition of words/lines; progressions in time/distance/event/ intensity; allusions; arrangement of ideas; word choice; and rhyme scheme.

In both the experimental and control groups the homework assignment was couplet writing. In the experimental group these were three image metaphor couplets (i.e. for the third scaffold). In the control group the students wrote a paragraph and then rewrote the concluding sentence as a couplet. In both the experimental and control groups there were then small group discussions about the homework couplets written by the group members. In both groups a few examples were chosen and they were then switched with another group. Later both groups developed the couplets into a longer poem.

In the rest of the unit, in both groups five to six more poems were discussed: In the experimental group these poems were selected and explored within the framework of the three concrete scaffolds for symbolic thinking, i.e. the teacher made frequent reference to the Cycle-Wheel”; used Venn diagrams to aid symbolic interpretations; and made reference to the alignments that had been made explicit by the scrambled couplets.

In the control group, the poems were selected and explored within the framework of how the poet uses poetic techniques to appeal to our emotions and imagination. For instance, in teaching Shakespeare’s famous sonnet, “When in Disgrace with Fortune and Men’s eyes,” to the 9th and 12th grade control groups, the lesson plan stated: “A. Intro: 1. Begin with statement that we are shifting from an external landscape to an internal one. 2. Ask for feedback from students on what causes them to feel depressed, and what brings them out of that feeling - connect to the poem… B. Method: 1. Define words that need explaining… 2. Find repetition – e.g., ‘like to him’, ‘like him’ - purpose of this repetition? (emphasize isolation, sense of inferiority); 3. Progressions - from depressed to joyful…4. Allusions…; 5. Arrangement of ideas….; 6. Word choices - elevate emotional feeling: ‘disgrace’.. ‘deaf heaven,’ ‘bootless cries,’ ‘sullen earth,’...; 7. Rhyme Scheme and Metre… iambic pentameter rhythm matches the rhythmic beating of our own hearts - e.g. ‘I all alone be weep my out cast state’ - / - / - / - / - / .” Although symbolic interpretation was not explicitly addressed in the control group, it must be noted that, as symbolic language is the basis of poetic expression (Frye, 1978), symbolic interpretation is frequently implicit in discussions about poetry. As can be seen in the above example, discussions of many of the word choices clearly involved references to metaphoric language, e.g. ‘deaf heaven,’ ‘bootless cries,’ or ‘sullen earth.’ However, the control groups were not provided with the concrete scaffolds, e.g., a Venn diagram or image couplet to explicitly compare a person’s joy after depression to a ‘lark at break of day arising/From sullen earth,’ and the teacher emphasized the emotion generated from such comparisons and word choices, such as “sullen earth,” but did not explicitly analyze the metaphors as metaphors. Coding of Symbolic Interpretations

For each poem, the response to the question: “What do you think this poem is about?” was coded into one of five categories adapted from Svensson (1987): “literal descriptive,” “literal interpretive,” “thematic” (which included mixed literal-thematic), “mixed literal-symbolic,” and “symbolic.” As readers construct meaning through the lens of their personal experience and imagination (Langer, 1993; Rosenblatt, 1978), interpretations coded as symbolic differed widely from each other. Descriptions of each coding category and examples of interpretive responses for each of the five categories have been provided in Appendix B. For ease of comprehension the examples have been taken from two of the texts, a short poem, “It is this persistent wind,” (See Appendix A) and the longest poem, Stephen Spender’s poem “What I expected” (both of which have been described earlier).

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Coders were blind as to whether a subject was in the control or experimental group. After the coding scheme had been established, one researcher coded a third of the total number of poems. A second researcher scored half of these coded poems. Discrepancies between the two coders were resolved through mutual discussion. The first researcher then coded the remaining poems accordingly, and the second researcher coded a third of these. At this stage, agreement was more than 86%. All remaining discrepancies were again resolved through discussion.Scoring of Symbolic Interpretations

As the focus was on whether the younger students in particular would be able to provide some form of symbolic interpretation, even if there was vacillation between a literal and symbolic approach, we divided the categories so as to create a dichotomous score: The “mixed literal-symbolic” category as well as the fully “symbolic” category were combined and coded as “symbolic,” and the four remaining categories, in which there was no demonstration of symbolic thinking, were coded as “non-symbolic.” Students therefore received either 0 (“non-symbolic” response) or 1 (“symbolic response”) for each of the five poems in the pretest and each of the six poems in the posttest. The dependent variable when testing for the effect of the intervention on symbolic processing was the mean number of poems read symbolically out of the total of six poems on the posttest (range 0 – 6). The mean of the five poems in the pretest (range 0 – 6) was a used as a covariate and also used in preliminary analyses.

ResultsThe results are presented in two sections. First, preliminary analyses, that is those which involve

the pretest data: 1. Grade-level differences in symbolic interpretation of poetry prior to the intervention and 2. Equivalence of the two poetry-lesson groups on known or suspected covariates of symbolic processing. The second section presents the results from the actual intervention, i.e. the effect of the intervention on 1. Symbolic processing and 2. Personal response. As five omnibus analyses were planned, the acceptable familywise α for statistical testing was reduced to .02 per test, using a simple Bonferroni adjustment (i.e., .10/5) as suggested by Tabachnick & Fidell (2007).

Preliminary Analyses1. Pretest Grade-level differences in Symbolic Interpretation of Poetry through Adolescence

Table 2 provides the percentage of responses in each category of Svensson’s coding scheme at each age level on the pretest. Symbolic (that is, mixed literal-symbolic or symbolic) responses were in evidence in 19% of 6th grade responses, 46% of 9th grade responses, and 71% of 12th grade responses.

--------------------------------------Insert Table 2 here-------------------------------------The three grades were compared in terms of mean number of poems read symbolically out of the

total of five poems on the pretest. A one-way analysis of covariance was conducted in which the Pretest Mean Number of Poems Read Symbolically was the dependent variable. The independent variable was grade with three levels: 6, 9 and 12. The Verbal Reasoning subtest of the CTCS was included as a covariate in order to (1) control for pre-existing differences in computational capacities, and (2) to statistically test the magnitude of the unique contribution of these capacities to skill in the symbolic interpretation of poetry. A Method 1 analysis (Overall & Spiegel, 1969) was employed, as it both allows testing of the unique contribution of the covariate to the dependent variable, after all other factors and interactions have been accounted for (Tabachnik & Fidell, 2007, p. 212), and is recommended in designs in which sample sizes are not equal. An initial analysis evaluating the homogeneity of slopes assumption indicated that the relationship between the covariate and pretest symbolic interpretation did not differ significantly as a function of grade. The ANCOVA was significant, F (2, 133) = 34.31, MSE = 1.70, p <.001. The relationship between grade and the dependent variable was strong, as measured by a partial eta square, with the grade factor uniquely accounting for 34.3% of the variance in number of poems read symbolically on the pretest. Adjusted means and standard errors for grade 6 Control and Experimental

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groups were 1.04 (0.27) and 1.12 (0.28), respectively; for grade 9 Control 2.62 (0.30) and Experimental 2.33 (0.28); and for grade 12 Control 3.05 (0.28) and Experimental 3.60 (0.27). Follow-up tests revealed that Grade 6 significantly differed from Grade 9, p < .001, and Grade 9 differed from Grade 12, p < .005 on this variable. Verbal reasoning uniquely accounted for 8.5% of the variance in Mean Number of Poems Read Symbolically, F (1, 133) = 20.93, p = .001. 2. The Equivalence of the Two Poetry-lesson Groups Prior to the Intervention

Statistical analyses were conducted to ascertain that the experimental group and control group at each grade level (6, 9, 12) were equivalent at pretest on suspected correlates of skill in the symbolic interpretation of poetry. See Table 3 for a list of these correlates, and scores by grade and by lesson group. No statistically significant pretest differences between the experimental and control groups on any variable were revealed.

--------------------------------------Insert Table 3 here-------------------------------------Results of the Intervention

1. Effect of Intervention on Symbolic Interpretation Ability Results from the posttest showed that when reading “Poem (as the Cat)” by William Carlos

Williams, the text which was only provided on the posttest, 26 students (39%) in the experimental group but only 7 students (11%) in the control group, provided symbolic interpretations. To reduce the number of statistical analyses and concomitant risk of Type 1 error, students’ scores on this poem were combined with the posttest scores of the original five poems that had also been read at pretest, and the mean of the five pretest scores were used as a covariate (in addition to the “Verbal Reasoning” subtest covariate). A 2 (Lesson Group) X 3 (Grade) analysis of covariance was conducted to determine whether the pedagogical intervention had an effect on adolescents’ success in interpreting poems symbolically over and above students’ pre-reading levels of symbolic interpretation before the intervention, and independent of verbal reasoning ability. The Lesson Group factor had two levels: Control and Experimental, and the Grade factor had three levels: 6, 9, and 12. The dependent variable was the Posttest Mean Number of Poems Read Symbolically, out of six poems read at posttest (the five included in the pretest, plus the one that participants had not seen before). Homogeneity of variance and of slopes test results were not significant, as is the case with all subsequent tests of assumptions below. The covariate, Pretest Number of Poems Read Symbolically, was held at 2.30, and that of Verbal Reasoning at 24.93. The adjusted mean for the Control group was 2.56 (SE = .17), and that of the Experimental group was 3.55 (SE = .16) poems read symbolically. The omnibus ANCOVA was significant, F (1, 121) = 18.45, MSE =1.69, p <.001. The effect size was fairly large as assessed by a partial eta square, with the Lesson Group factor accounting for 13.2% of the variance in Posttest Number of Poems Read Symbolically after control by the covariates. The Grade factor was not significant, p = .07; nor was the interaction between Lesson Group and Grade, p = .97. Table 4 displays the unadjusted and adjusted means of the symbolic interpretation scores on the Posttest for the Control and Experimental groups at the three grade levels. The computational skills proxy measure, Verbal Reasoning, uniquely accounted for 7.1% of the variance in the Posttest Number of Poems Read Symbolically, p < .005, while the Pretest Number of Poems Read Symbolically accounted for 29.2% of the variance, p < .001.

……………………………Insert Table 4 here……………………………….2. Effect of Intervention on Personal Response Ratings

Enjoyment experienced while reading the test poems. To examine a possible dampening effect of the intervention on students’ enjoyment of the test poems, a 2 (Lesson Group) X 3 (Grade) analysis of covariance was conducted in which the Posttest Mean Enjoyment ratings of the six test poems was the dependent variable. The covariate was the Mean Enjoyment ratings of the five pretest poems. The test of homogeneity of variance and slopes were acceptable. The covariate was evaluated at 5.28. The

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Experimental group’s adjusted Posttest Mean Enjoyment of the Test Poems (5.34, SE = .16) was significantly greater than that of the Control group (4.76, SE = .17), F (1, 130) = 6.33, MSE = 1.81, p = .013. The effect size was fairly small as assessed by a partial eta square, with the Lesson Group factor accounting for 4.6% of the variance of the mean enjoyment ratings of the poems at posttest after controlling for any differences in students’ enjoyment ratings of the poems during the pretest. There was also a significant main effect for Grade, F (2, 130) = 8.23, partial eta square = .112, p < .001, with this factor thus accounting for 11.2% of the variance in Posttest Mean Enjoyment. Adjusted means were: Grade 6 (M = 4.47, SE = .20), Grade 9 (M = 5.65, SE = .21), and Grade 12 (M = 5.03, SE = .19). Pairwise comparisons showed that the adjusted Grade 6 mean differed significantly from that of Grade 9, p <.001. However, the Grade 6 mean did not differ significantly from the Grade 12 mean, p = .046. The Grade 9 mean did not significantly differ from that of Grade 12, p = .035. The interaction between Lesson and Grade was also not significant, p = .97. See Table 5 for the adjusted means and standard errors of all personal response ratings on the Posttest for the Control and Experimental groups. Unadjusted means were: Grade 6 (M = 4.38, SD = 1.97), Grade 9 (M = 5.12, SD = 2.21), and Grade 12 (M = 5.57, SD = 2.18).

……………………………Insert Table 5 here………………………………. Emotion experienced while reading the test poems. To examine a possible dampening effect of the intervention on emotion, a 2 (Lesson Group) X 3 (Grade) analysis of covariance was conducted to determine the contribution of the Lesson Group to variability in Posttest Mean Emotion when reading the intervention poems. The Lesson Group factor had two levels: Control group and Experimental group, and the Grade factor had three levels: (Grades 6, 9, 12). One covariate was included: Pretest Average Emotion across the five poems, held at 4.62. Adjusted means between Lesson Groups did not significantly differ, F (1, 129) = 3.35, MSE =1.83, partial eta square = .025, p = .07. The Control group adjusted mean was 4.05 (SE = .17) and that of the Experimental group was 4.48 (SE = .16). Unadjusted means were: Control (4.03, SD = 2.43) and Experimental (4.51, SD = 1.97). The interaction between Lesson Group and Grade was not significant, p = .48.

Perceived difficulty ratings of the test poems. To examine whether students who had the symbolism lessons considered the test poems more or less difficult at posttest than those in the control group, a 2 (Lesson Group) X 3 (Grade) analysis of covariance was conducted on Posttest Mean Perceived Difficulty of the poems. The covariate Pretest Mean Perceived Difficulty of the poems was held at 4.48. The adjusted mean of the Control group was 4.08 (SE = .16), and that of the Intervention group was 4.32 (SE = .16), but this factor was not a significant contributor to Posttest Mean Perceived Difficulty, F (1, 132) = 2.38, partial eta square = .018, p = .125. Unadjusted means were 4.14 (SD = 1.97) for the Control group and 4.38 (SD = 1.97) for the Intervention group. The interaction between Lesson Group and Grade was not a significant factor in the analysis, p = .65.

Enjoyment of poetry in general. To determine whether readers’ ratings of their Enjoyment of Reading Poetry in General after the intervention would be dampened by explicitly providing domain-specific knowledge of the symbolic process, a 2 (Lesson Group) X 3 (Grade) analysis of covariance was used, in which the Pretest Enjoyment of Reading Poetry in General was the covariate. The covariate was held at 5.57. The analysis revealed no effect for Lesson Group, F (1, 130) = .14, MSE = 2.49, partial eta square = .00, p = .71, with adjusted means of 4.92 (SE = .19) for the Control group and 5.02 (SE = .19) for the Experimental group and no significant interaction between Lesson group and Grade.

DiscussionIn summary, the study found that providing domain-specific knowledge about the symbolic

process not only fostered symbolic interpretation during middle- and later-adolescence but also during pre-adolescence. Furthermore, this explicit instruction in symbolic interpretation did not dampen

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students’ personal response when reading the poems. Indeed, the experimental group’s ratings of the posttest poems in terms of enjoyment were significantly higher than the control group’s ratings.The role of domain-specific knowledge in adolescents’ symbolic interpretation.

It is important for teachers to know if there is a fixed developmental timetable such that they need to temper expectations that students will be able to interpret poetry symbolically. The results of the present study do not suggest such a fixed timetable, at least from the age of 11 years. Providing 6th, 9th and 12th grade students with concrete, visual, domain-specific knowledge that makes the symbolic process explicit resulted in a significantly greater number of poems interpreted symbolically over and above the contribution of computational skills and prior skill in symbolic interpretation. The results showed only a modest contribution of computational capacities to symbolic interpretation skill, but a major contribution of domain-specific knowledge acquisition. The mean posttest performance of the 6th grade Experimental group improved to almost the level of the 9th grade Control group, and the mean posttest performance of the 9th grade Experimental group improved to above the level of the 12th grade Control group. Even on the difficult poetic text, “Poem (As the Cat)” by William Carlos Williams, which students had not seen before, nearly 40% of the Experimental group but only 11% of the Control group generated symbolic interpretations. Furthermore, the lack of a significant grade factor does not provide support for concerns that at ages 11 to 12 there are performance difficulties on tasks which involve response inhibition (Blakemore & Choudhury, 2006). The results are more in line with Piagetian and neo-Piagetian notions that symbolic thinking begins at the age of 11 years (Case, 1992; Inhelder & Piaget, 1958).

This study’s support for the argument that difficulties with symbolic processing when reading poetry are at least partly a result of deficits in domain-specific knowledge acquisition fits well with Annette Karmiloff-Smith’s theory of cognitive development. According to Karmiloff-Smith (1992), representations must first become minimally explicit in order to be manipulated at the subconscious level, and then more explicit to be accessible to consciousness and verbal articulation. She proposes that this consciousness allows for representational flexibility and control, which in turn allows for creativity. When reading poetry there is a need for such representational flexibility and creativity in order to imaginatively explore the multiple meanings and interpretive possibilities of the poem. With lesson group assignment providing a major contribution to the variance in the posttest symbolic interpretation measure, domain-specific instruction appears to have fostered explicit representations of the symbolic process.

It was, however, not possible in this study to isolate which of the concrete scaffolds was less or more effective, or how they interacted with each other. Very broadly, developmental research has shown that, even for older learners there is a recapitulation from concrete to abstract in any new area of study (Granott, Fischer & Parziale, 2002; Schwartz & Fischer, 2004), and the concrete and visual representations used in the intervention - the cycle-wheel, the Venn diagrams, and the physically separated image metaphors - appear to have been effective scaffolds in fostering symbolic interpretation. The participants appear to have developed what Steinley (1982) calls a “symbologizing schema,” a shared structure of domain-specific knowledge which guided their decisions about elements of the poems that might be construed as symbolic, and this, in turn, guided their interpretations.

Effect of instruction on personal response. Not only did the provision of domain-specific instruction on symbolic processing not dampen personal response to poetry, but the experimental group’s ratings of the posttest poems in terms of enjoyment were significantly higher than the control groups’ ratings. What might account for this result?

A possible explanation is that the scaffolds contributed to the students experiencing a greater feeling of competence in symbolic processing of poetry. Research on self-determination theory (Ryan &

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Deci, 2000) suggests that in both middle childhood and adolescence, competence might be the most important psychological need for overall wellbeing (Veronneau, Koestner, and Abela, 2005), and having a lack of perceived competence is related to less persistence and involvement through the school years (e.g., Miserandino, 1996; Vallerand, Fortier, & Guag, 1997). With regard to symbolic interpretation researchers have suggested that high school students begin to believe that there is some unnamed ability required to do well in English (Pirie, 2002; Smith & Wilhelm, 2006) and they treat symbolic interpretation as “some mystical activity to which they are not privy” (Steinley, 1982, p. 45). Without the requisite interpretive strategies they do not have the “pleasurable experience of competence” when engaging in literary activities (Smith and Wilhelm, 2004; p. 455). It seems possible that, in the present study, when students were provided with explicit strategies for symbolic processing of poetry through the three concrete representations, symbolic thinking became demystified and students’ perceived competence and positive affect increased. The cycle-wheel was a visual representation of part of the “grammar,” or interlinked family, of recurring symbols. As students began to internalize some of the communal meanings shared by readers and authors, they could begin to recognize patterns that they might not previously have observed. The Venn diagrams were visual organizers which made salient the overlapping similarities between the actual topic being described and the symbolic vehicle being used to describe it. Indeed, a few students actually drew Venn diagrams as visual aids when analyzing the posttest poems. Finally, image metaphor couplets have the source and target elements on two separate lines, and the students not only wrote their own couplets, but were required to physically re-unite the separated lines of another group’s couplets. As they worked in small groups, evaluating and justifying the mapping of a target line onto a symbolic line, they were engaging in symbolic interpretation. At times, new couplets emerged in the reconstructions, which encouraged an awareness of imaginative connections and the fact that different people can interpret symbols in different ways.

It is possible that through this short unit, as the three scaffolds complemented and reinforced each other, the symbolic process became demystified, and students’ perceived competence - their evaluation that they might be able to succeed at the task - increased accordingly. Beiswenger & Grolnick (2010) found a correlation between self-assessed competence in adolescents aged 11 to 14 and intrinsic motivation as measured by students’ enjoyment ratings of an activity, which is precisely the measure on which the experimental group significantly outperformed the control group in the present study. As Harackiewicz, Manderlink & Sansone note, “When people are made to feel more competent at some activity, they are expected to enjoy it more.” (1992, p. 115). The suggestions above, however, are somewhat speculative, and point to the need for future research in which students’ self-perceived competence would be measured. Changes across Adolescence in Symbolic Interpretation

Finally, although this was not a primary aim of the research, analysis of the pretest data suggests that there are significant changes in symbolic interpretation across adolescence and that there does not seem to be a watershed moment. Although the advantages of using the same test poems across the three grades are obvious, it might be argued though that the texts were more challenging for 6th graders and this finding is partly a result of differences in reading comprehension rather than differences in symbolic processing. However, as noted above, we required affirmation from both of the grade 6 teachers that the language of the test poems was suitable, and changes were made if vocabulary was deemed too difficult for 6th graders. We also explicitly asked all students at each grade level to rate the difficulty level of each poem with “I found this very easy” as 0 and “I found this very difficult” as 10. As can be seen in Table 3, grade 6 students found the poems fairly easy, and their ratings were no different from the older students. In addition, even if there were some struggling readers this would have been somewhat taken into account by our use of the verbal reasoning test as a covariate. Not only did the verbal reasoning test

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involve reading comprehension (see Vanderveen, Huff, Gierl, McNamara, Louwerse, & Graesser, 2007), but there is evidence that for struggling young readers, verbal reasoning and reading comprehension are significantly correlated (Berninger, Abbott, Vermeulen, & Fulton, 2006). Thus, the present results support the developmental picture presented by earlier studies testing metaphor processing in non-poetic contexts (Billow, 1975; Gentner, 1988; Levorato & Cacciari, 2002; Svensson, 1987).Limitations

One limitation of this study is the small sample size and the fact that the students were from middle- to upper middle class backgrounds. Mcdonald, Keesler, Kauffman and Schneider (2006) defined “scaling-up” interventions as the practice of introducing effective interventions into different settings with the aim of producing the same effects in multiple studies with diverse populations, and such “scaling up” is needed in the present study to help determine the effect of the intervention in different populations. A further possible criticism is that this study used a holistic measure, i.e., whether students actually provided symbolic interpretations when reading poetry, rather than measuring the various separate strands of domain-specific knowledge of symbolic interpretation, i.e., an expectation that a poem involves polyvalence; knowledge of the “grammar” of symbols; an ability to infer the commonalities between the target and source (as made clear in the Venn diagrams); and to map and align them (as in the image metaphors). However, the holistic measure was chosen for pragmatic reasons as it is the specific skill assessed in the English classroom, and conceptually it is predicated on the various strands of knowledge discussed above. Conclusions

Evidence from this interdisciplinary study suggests that young adolescents’ difficulties with imaginative symbolic interpretation of poetry seem to be less a result of cognitive developmental constraints than deficits in domain-specific knowledge, in particular, the explicit representations required for symbolic processing. Even preadolescents who received three scaffolds designed to foster explicit, concrete representations of the knowledge and strategies needed to think with a symbolic mind, significantly outperformed the control group. Furthermore, the students in the experimental group rated their enjoyment of the test poems significantly higher than the students who did not receive these scaffolds. A critical function of applied developmental psychology is to provide teachers with information about how development might affect the sequence and timing of the curriculum in various subject areas. Although this study does not necessarily advocate that English teachers introduce formal training in symbolic processing to 6th graders, it does suggest that teachers need not be concerned that a fixed cognitive developmental timetable necessitates that they wait before expecting young adolescents to engage in symbolic interpretation when reading literature.

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Appendix AThe three test poems adapted from those used in Svensson’s study (1987, p. 503)

It is this persistent windIt is this persistent windIt just gets stronger

One after the other the old trees fallhere in the garden

Before the fruit has had time toripen

Autumn walk

A man walks through the woodson a day of changing light.Meets few people, stops, gazesat the autumn sky.

He heads towards the old, mossy gravestonesin the churchyard andno one follows him.

The light and the beetle

Light - on everything and everyoneEven the smallest beetlehas a shadow from which he cannot run

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Appendix BPoetry Symbolism Coding Scheme (adapted from Svensson, 1987) with Examples from “It is this persistent wind” and Steven Spender’s (1970) “What I expected”

Category Definition andGuidelines for Coding

Examples from “It is this persistent wind” and “What I expected”

Literal Descriptive A response is offered that consists of nothing but what is explicitly expressed in the poem. No point is noted; no enigma is indicated and/ or responded to.

It is this persistent wind: “The wind blows and trees fall.” What I expected: “I think it’s about a rock climber.”

Literal Interpretive An interpretation is presented that, on a literal level, at least partly goes beyond what is explicitly expressed in the poem. A point or an enigma is created and occasionally expounded or elaborated.

It is this persistent wind: “It’s a gardener who is sad because his fruit falls off before it has had time to ripen.” What I expected: “This poem’s about someone who has been through war. He’s describing how much he expected of the army, but tells what he got in return.”

Thematic or Mixed Literal Thematic

The response consists of a generalized inference concerning a surface point or enigma. An abstracted overall meaning or organizing principle is proposed, sometimes in the form of a saying or a saying-like wording. Other parts of the interpretation offered may still indicate a literal reading.

It is this persistent wind: “This poem is about what wind can do and what it does, and how powerful it is.”What I expected: “This poem is about a person describing his/her struggle with will and strength. Words such as ‘climbing,’ ‘rocks,” ‘struggle’ hint that the person is describing his/her experience with rock-climbing. The theme is: as time passes, a person’s will is weakened.”

Mixed Literal Symbolic

Either there is an individual element in a whole given a symbolic meaning, while the rest is approached literally, or there is a vacillation between a literal and a symbolic approach to the whole work or parts of it.

It is this persistent wind: “I think this poem is about people being killed by storms. I think the wind is creating violent storms and little and young people are being killed. The reason I said young and little people are being killed is because I think the fruit is the people and they haven't ripened, like, grown up.”

Symbolic Some sort of abstracted summarizing statement is made which entails an implicit or explicit analogical transference of the symbolic element(s) to some other specific objects, image etc which they are supposed to represent.

It is this persistent wind: “This is about hopes and dreams dashed by oppression.”What I expected: “Life in general. This person has evidently seen the immorality and corruption of this world and has clearly lost a lot of the will he/she had as a child.”

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Table 1Mean Age and Gender of Participants by Grade and Lesson Group for the Control (Cont.) and Experimental (Exp.) Groups

6n=45

9n=42

12n=50

Cont.n=23

Exp.n=22

Cont.n=20

Exp.n=22

Cont.n=25

Exp.n=25

Mean Age Years SD

11.30(.47)

11.27(.46)

14.35(.50)

14.41(.50)

17.36(.76)

17.32(.48)

Gender #Females #Males

1310

148

911

1111

1015

1114

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Table 2Pretest: Percentage of Responses in each of Svensson’s Categories by Grade on the Symbol Interpretation Task

Grade Non-SymbolicCategories

Symbolic Categories

Total Symbolic

A missing response

Literal Descrip-

tive

Literal Interpretive

Thematic or Mixed Literal-

Thematic

Mixed Literal

Symbolic

Symbolic Mixed Literal

Symbolic or

Symbolic

6 1 6 60 14 5 15 199 5 2 35 12 8 38 4612 3 1 20 6 8 63 71

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Table 3Pretest: Means and Standard Deviations of Pretest Variables for Control (Cont.) and Experimental (Exp.) Groups by Grade

6 9 12

Cont.n=23

Exp.n=22

Cont.n=20

Exp.n=22

Cont.n=25

Exp.n=25

Grade in English Course Mean SD

80.17(9.11)

78.24a

(5.97)75.79 a

(10.71)78.62 a

(7.45)81.20(7.08)

80.32(7.20)

Number of Poems Interpreted Symbolically -- Unadjusted (0-5) Mean SD

.96(1.07)

1.09(1.48)

2.37(1.56)

2.27(1.35)

3.20(1.68)

3.80(.87)

Personal Response Ratings (0-10): Enjoyment (test poems) Mean SD

5.04(1.28)

5.37(1.69)

4.64(2.49)

4.75(1.78)

5.74(1.63)

5.98(1.42)

Emotion (test poems) Mean SD

4.29(1.69)

4.74(1.88)

4.29(2.63)

4.39(2.15)

5.17(2.05)

4.76(2.05)

Difficulty (test poems) Mean SD

4.46(1.93)

4.13(2.47)

4.12(2.23)

4.53(2.31)

4.98(1.34)

4.46(1.89)

Enjoyment (poetry in general) Mean SD

5.87(1.79)

5.41(3.42)

4.93(3.25)

6.05 a

(2.60)5.48

(2.80)5.76

(2.39)

a One participant did not provide this information.

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Table 4Posttest: Unadjusted Means (0-6) and Standard Deviation and Adjusted Means and Standard Errors for Number of Poems Read Symbolically for the Control (Cont.) and Experimental (Exp.) Groups by Grade, with Totals

6 9 12

Cont.n=23

Exp.n=22

Totaln=45

Cont.n=19

Exp.n=21

Totaln=40

Cont.n=21

Exp.n=23

Totaln=44

UnadjustedMeanSD

1.52(1.59)

2.59(2.26)

2.04(2.00)

2.84(1.38)

3.86(1.39)

3.38(1.46)

3.10(1.45)

4.43(1.70)

3.80(1.71)

AdjustedMeanSE

2.48(0.30)

3.41(0.30)

2.95(.23)

2.93(0.31)

3.94(0.28)

3.44(.21)

2.25(0.30)

3.31(0.30)

2.78(.23)

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Table 5Posttest: Adjusted Means and Standard Errors for Response Rating scores for Control (Cont.) and Experimental (Exp.) Groups by Grade

6 9 12

Cont.n=23

Exp.n=22

Cont.n=19

Exp.n=21

Cont.n=21

Exp.n=23

Personal Response Ratings: Enjoyment (test poems) Mean SE

4.17(0.29)

4.77(0.29)

5.33(0.30)

5.97(0.20)

4.78(0.27)

5.28(0.27)

Emotion (test poems) Mean SE

3.44(0.28)

4.26(0.29)

4.27(0.30)

4.45(0.29)

4.46(0.28)

4.73(0.27)

Difficulty (test poems) Mean SE

3.75(0.28)

4.40(0.28)

4.18(0.30)

4.65(0.28)

4.44(0.27)

4.76(0.26)

Enjoyment (poetry in general) Mean SE

4.37(0.33)

4.58(0.34)

4.80(0.35)

4.91(0.35)

5.59(0.31)

5.58(0.32)

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Running head: THE SYMBOLIC INTERPRETATION OF POETRY€¦ · Web viewThe intervention. The aim of this study was not primarily to examine how to teach symbolic interpretation, but