Elsevier

Learning and Instruction

Volume 60, April 2019, Pages 245-251
Learning and Instruction

Constructing interpretive inferences about literary text: The role of domain-specific knowledge

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.learninstruc.2017.12.004Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Successful literary reading requires the generation of interpretive inferences.

  • Students do not readily construct these interpretive inferences.

  • Experts rely on domain-specific knowledge of literary conventions to generate these inferences.

  • Providing expert-like literary convention knowledge increases production of interpretive inferences.

Abstract

Student readers struggle to construct the interpretive inferences necessary for successful literary comprehension. Expert think-alouds were conducted to identify the kinds of domain-specific knowledge that were drawn upon when reading the short story The Elephant. These data were used to construct three reading instructions provided to student (novice) literary readers. These instructions informed the student about two types of literary conventions (Rules of Notice, Rules of Signification, Combined). Analysis of the students’ essays indicated having both types of domain-specific knowledge yielded the most interpretive inferences. Attention to language mediated the effect suggesting a means for domain-specific knowledge to be used to leverage student engagement in literary interpretation.

Introduction

Recent work in reading and discourse comprehension, in conjunction with changing literacy standards, has emphasized the importance of domain-specific reading (Goldman, 2012, Goldman et al., 2016). Domain or discipline-specific reading emphasizes that different disciplines require different reading skills and strategies in order to make sense of and learn from texts. That is to say that a textbook for a science class is read differently than a novel for an English class (e.g., Hanauer, 1998). More specifically different amounts and types of inferences are generated to maintain comprehension given different types of texts and tasks. The majority of this work investigates expository texts within the domains of science and history. Less attention has been paid to literature and understanding how students read, process, understand, and learn from literary texts (McCarthy, 2015).

In literary reading, one of the reader's goals is to identify a deeper meaning in the work and examine how the author conveyed this meaning through his or her manipulation of language (Langer, 2010, Lee, 2007, Lee, 2011, Levine and Horton, 2013). Thus, in addition to the processing that must occur to maintain a mental representation of the story world, successful literary readers must also construct interpretive inferences that go beyond the world of the story to speak to the world at large (Goldman et al., 2015, Magliano et al., 1996, McCarthy and Goldman, 2015). Expert literary readers readily produce these interpretive inferences when reading and writing about literary works. Novices, on the other hand, do not generate these interpretive inferences. Rather they mainly restate elements of the plot (e.g. Earthman, 1992, Graves and Frederiksen, 1991, Peskin, 1998, Zeitz, 1994). Novices in these studies (high school and college students) are likely expert readers in the general sense, but are novice literary readers because they do not have extensive experience in interpreting literary works. For the remainder of this paper, expertise refers to years of formal training in literary analysis. One possible reason novices tend not engage in interpretation is that they may be unaware of the interpretive purpose of literary works. Rather than adopting an interpretive stance, or reading goal, toward the text, they maintain a more domain-general literal stance (Goldman et al., 2015). Indeed, when novices are given task instructions that bias an interpretive stance they produce more interpretive inferences (McCarthy & Goldman, 2015). Of course, simply knowing that interpretation is a goal of literary reading does not mean that the novice will be able to construct interpretations or that the interpretations they produce will be as sophisticated as those constructed by the experts. In addition to knowledge of the interpretive goal of literary text, experts also have knowledge about common literary conventions and themes that they can draw upon. This knowledge may be what allows them to recognize that an interpretive stance is appropriate, construct interpretations, and justify the interpretation with textual evidence and appeals to cultural and literary norms (Lee and Goldman, 2015, McCarthy, 2015).

Rabinowitz (1987) refers to these literary conventions as Rules of Notice and Rules of Signification. He suggests that authors are able to convey particular meanings because author and reader have shared knowledge of these rules. Rules of Notice, such as repetition, tone shift, juxtaposition, privileged position, deviations from the norm, and disruptions or discrepancies, are stylistic variations that cue the reader to look for meaning beyond the literal and draw the reader's attention to specific parts of the text. Importantly, knowledge of what to notice is only the first step in constructing interpretations. Think-aloud studies show that novice readers do attend to some of these stylistic variations, particularly disruptions or discrepancies that impede their comprehension of the literal aspects of the text. However, they do not use the information to make an interpretation. Instead, they tend to comment on the rule of notice as odd or confusing and may attribute it to their own comprehension failure (Burkett and Goldman, 2016, Graves and Frederiksen, 1991). This highlights the importance of the second aspect of convention knowledge, Rules of Signification. Rules of Signification are the conventionalized ways of making meaning from what is noticed. These rules reflect common themes (e.g. man's inhumanity to man, loss of innocence) and genres (e.g. political satire, romanticism) to construct interpretations. There are stark contrasts between experts and novices use of these rules, as illustrated by the following example from a think-aloud study that featured a passage from The Color Purple (Graves & Frederiksen, 1991). The passage contained sentences that were syntactically incorrect. A novice reader noted this was confusing and difficult to read. In contrast, the expert reread and determined that the sentence likely reflected a southern black dialect. From there the expert was able to contextualize the work and consider that an interpretation of the text might speak to race relations.

Thus, the knowledge experts bring to bear when reading literary works encompasses knowing the interpretive purpose of literature, what features of the text to attend to, as well as how to integrate these features into an interpretation. One way in which researchers and educators may be able to encourage novice readers to engage in interpretation may be to familiarize them with this domain knowledge.

The purpose of the current study was to explore the effect of domain-specific knowledge on novice readers’ interpretative behaviors, both in terms of the production of interpretive inferences and an increased attention to the specific language in the text. Rather than guess at whether, where, and what kind of literary convention knowledge was relevant in a given text, we first collected expert think-aloud data to identify the kinds of behaviors experts engage in and the aspects of the text they attended to for this particular story (Study 1). This information was then used to construct three reading instructions that provided readers with information about 1) Rules of Notice, 2) Rules of Signification, or 3) a combination of both types of information (Study 2). We assessed how these different instructions affected the generation of interpretive inferences and how this was related to attention to language in the text.

Section snippets

Study 1: Expert think-aloud study

Experts were recruited to identify the Rules of Notice and Rules of Signification relevant for this particular story. Consistent with previous research, expertise was defined by amount of formal training (e.g., English graduate students or faculty). In this study, our experts were English PhDs who were current faculty members in a college English department. In addition, these experts completed the Author Recognition Task (ART; Acheson, Welles, & MacDonald, 2008), which assesses readers’

Study 2: Reading instruction manipulation

Three instructional conditions were developed based on the information provided by the experts in Study 1. In the Rules of Notice condition, the task instructions indicated that experts look at the language in the text to think about a deeper meaning and provided descriptions of the three Rules of Notice commonly identified by the experts. In the Rules of Signification condition, readers were provided a brief definition of satire and its purpose as well as examples drawn from contemporary

Discussion

This study showed that providing domain-specific knowledge about literary conventions increased novice readers' inclusion of interpretive inferences and attention to language features in their essays. Participants who were given information about both Rules of Notice (stylistic variations in the text that signal to the reader to pay attention) and Rules of Signification (common meanings or themes that can be drawn upon from what is noticed) produced more interpretive inferences than those who

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