The Development of Poetic Literacy During the School Years

Abstract

There is growing consensus that, for trained readers, poetic-text processing involves a genre decision, which triggers genre-based conventional expectations and directs attention to the textual devices. This research examines how students recognize and process texts in poetic versus prose form at different points during their literary education. The study compared 48 students, 16 in each of Grades 4, 8, and 12 as they thought aloud when reading poems in the graphic shape of poetry, as well as prose. Results showed that the 4th graders did not yet categorize a poem as a poem. The 8th graders made significantly more poetic-genre categorizations than the 4th graders, but only the 12th graders spent more time processing the texts in poetic form than prose, thinking aloud about their genre-based expectations and the textual devices. Developing the structure of knowledge needed for poetic literacy seems to require a long process of formal literary education.

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