| Students can readily engage in summary and literal sense-making when reading poems, short stories, and other literary texts, but are often unable to construct inferences and thematic interpretations of these works. This dissertation discusses the results of two studies of high school classroom interventions in which students were made aware of affect-based interpretive practices they used outside the classroom, and then taught a related affect-based interpretive heuristic to use when engaging in literary interpretation in the classroom. The heuristic, here called "affective evaluation," asked students to read literary texts with a view toward identifying language, actions, and events that they felt were particularly affect-laden. Students made subjective evaluations of valence, tones, and moods they felt were created by those parts of texts, and then provided explanations or justifications of their evaluations. The first study examines pre- and post-study written interpretations of poetry made by an intervention and a comparison group. The second study, conducted a year later, examines intervention and comparison reading protocols in response to a short story, made both before and after an intervention. Quantitative and qualitative analyses show that in both studies, the intervention groups made significant gains in the level of interpretive responses to literary texts. The results suggest that the complex processes of textual interpretation can be supported by helping students recognize, draw on, and apply everyday interpretive practices to literary texts. |
