M. Voulgaraki & I. Agaliotis 

University of Macedonia, Thessaloniki, GREECEmarigakivou@gmail.com, iagal@uom.gr

Reading poetry can contribute to theenhancement of:

• phonological awareness, vocabulary, decoding, comprehension, and writing (Cunningham & Allington, 2002),

• conceptual understanding and students’ attention during reading (Sekeres & Gregg, 2007),

• understanding the characters, the story, and the narrative point of view (Kucan, 2007).

Τhere is evidence that poem reading and writing improves motivation and student confidence (Wilfong, 2008).

Students with Learning Disabilities (LD) usually have restricted literacy skills (Lerner & Beverley, 2014).

Due to these restrictions students with LD may be unable to access poems and profit from dealing with them.

In one of the very few studies on possible differences between students with LD and their typicalpeers in comprehending poems, Lee and Hughes (2012) established that students with LD have increased difficulties in:

understanding an extended metaphor, moving beyond the surface meaning of the poems, placing due emphasis on understood rather than on

evoked emotions in their poetic processing.

On the other hand Lee and Hughes (2012) found that students with LD:

effectively used as many interpretive operations as their peers,adopted an aesthetic stance to reading,performed more like experts than novices

and even

outperformed slightly their typical peers in identifying figurative devices (e.g. personification).

Small samples and lack of inferential statistics limit drastically the generalizability of results from existing studies. Hence, the present research sought to answer the following questions:

What are the differences between students with LD and their typical peers in comprehending poems?

What are the differences between students with LD and their typical peers in the knowledge of poetic devices?

What are the differences between students with LD and their typical peers in the strategies for accessing poems’ content?

80 students of the 5th and 6th grades (11-12 years of age) of 13 primary schools situated in the wider area of Thessaloniki, Greece.

40 of those students (50%) were diagnosed as presenting Learning Disability.

Males: 52.5% Females:47.5% (see Table 1)

Table 1. Demographic characteristics of the participants

Typical students Students with LD

5th grade 6th grade 5th grade 6th grade Total

Males 9 (22,5%) 12 (30%) 10 (25%) 11 (27,5%) 42 (52,5%)

Females 11 (27,5%) 8 (20%) 11 (27,5%) 8 (20%) 38 (47,5%)

Total 20 (50%) 20 (50%) 21 (52,5%) 19 (47,5%) 40 (100%)

General total 40 (100%) 40 (100%)

Poems:

One traditional (titled “The beach”, by N. Kampas, 1880) and one contemporary (titled “Meeting with the sea”, by N. Vrettakos, 1991).

Both poems are referring to marine landscapes.

They differ in terms of style and structure.

Questionnaire based on the instrument used by

Lee and Hughes (2012) 28 items

Questions referring to: participants’ literature preferences and their

relationship to poetry, poem’s comprehension and interpretation, representation of poem’s content and its relation to

their personal experiences, participants’ knowledge and understanding of poetic

devices, participants’ emotions and enjoyment.

A pilot study was used to improve the questionnaire’s functionality.

The feedback given by 3 language arts teachers majored in literacy instruction was taken into consideration.

The researchers randomly chose 10% of the participants’ answers and coded them.

They asked 4 language arts teachers to evaluate the same answers.

The inter-rater agreement reached the level of 91%.

Two 20-minutes sessions per student were allocated for the completion of the questionnaire.

All proceedings were videotaped.

Table 2. Literature preferences and relationship to poetry

Typical students % Students with LD %

Adventure books/ mystery and detective stories

62,5 30

Fairytales, children stories and comic books

22,5 37,5

Prefer poems over prosaic texts

30 50

Read poetry outside school 47,5 45

Never written poems of their own

27,5 45

Table 3. Poem comprehension abilitiesTraditional Poem Contemporary Poem

Typical % LD % Typical % LD %

Makes prediction 100 85 100 85

Confirms prediction 82.5 72.5 85 62.5

Identifies theme 70 47.5 72.5 60

Justifies inference 70 20 80 32.5

Connects to personal experiences

65 67.5 82.5 77.5

Represents mentally / visualizes

92.5 70 87.5 72.5

Names evoked emotions relevant to poem

40 12.5 70 37.5

Compares poems’ themes

95 85

Compares poets’ relation to nature

80 22.5

Compares poems’ style

55 12.5

Table 4. Knowledge of poetic devices

Traditional poem Contemporary poem

TD % LD% TD % LD %

Identifies rhyme 100 52,5 - -

Names the rhyming type 80 47,5 - -

Indicates poem personifications using descriptions

82,5 72,5 - -

Discerns personification from other figures of speech

67,5 30 - -

Discerns metaphor from other figures of speech

65 35 - -

Offers reasons for the use of figures of speech

90 30 62,5 30

Explains personifications included in the poem

- - 62,5 17,5

Explains similes included in the poem

- - 60 15

Explains metaphors included in the poem

- - 82,5 25

Students with LD:

Have difficulties in predicting the poem’s content based just on its title, even with the use of hints.

This result is in tune with the view of Carliste and Rice (2002).

In contrast, the difference between the two groups in confirming their predictions was rather small. This result is in line with the Lee and Hughes (2012).

The differences between typical and learning disabled students in the identification of the poems’ main idea and the justification of the inferences drawn by the poets, may be due to difficulties in:

differentiation between the central and the peripheral information of the text,

the appropriate vocabulary, knowledge of syntax and morphology, functional conceptual development, familiarization with text structures, focusing their attention, and memory skills (Porpodas, 2002; Swanson, Kehler, & Jerman, 2010).

In the present context the aforementioned processing weaknesses may have been seriously challenged by the conceptual density, the ellipticity and the abstraction characterizing the poetic genre.

a) Relate the poems to their personal experiences:

The high percentage of participants from both groups who could connect the poems to their personal experiences corroborates findings from the Sipe (2000) study.

(b) Mentally represent and describe images from the poems:

The difficulty of students with LD to refer to mental pictures of the landscapes could be due to the restrictions often found in this population in short- and long- term memory, vocabulary, transformation of information coming from one sensory source to a form corresponding to another, and oral language (Cain & Oakhill, 1999).

(c) Mention emotions evoked after reading / listening the poem:

The quantitative and qualitative differences between typical and learning disabled students could be attributed to weaknesses in self –awareness, vocabulary, and especially empathy, reported to have been found in the population of students with LD (e.g. Bauminger, Edelsztein, & Morash, 2005).

The well-established deficiencies of the LD population in identifying, organizing and retaining important information, vocabulary, syntax, and sentence structure,combining information in order to draw conclusions (e.g. Lerner & Beverley, 2014)

may serve as context for explaining these difficulties.

Students with LD have significantly more difficulties than their typical peers in identifying rhyme.

This deficiency could be connected to the poor phonological skills often characterizing students with LD (Vellutino, 1991; Stanovich, 1992).

Students with LD have considerable difficulties in interpreting metaphors and explaining similes and personifications.

This is in line with findings from the studies conducted by Nippold & Fey (1983), Seidenberg & Bernstein (1986), and Lee & Kamhi (1990).

Students with LD:

required on average 25.5% more hints than their typical peers in order to provide correct answers.

This testifies their inferiority in recalling information in comparison to their typical peers.

However, it also denotes that oftentimes students with LD possess knowledge that can be retrieved and used to improve their performance, provided that the appropriate questioning technique is utilized.

No differentiation of possible sub-groups in the population of students with LD.

No data on the participants’ opportunities to be exposed to literature experiences in their family context.

Instruction should be oriented toward the improvement of:

vocabulary, syntactic schemes’ understanding, information organization and categorization, and inductive reasoning.

Metaphors should become an independent objective in the context of instruction.

Special emphasis should be laid on empathy issues and emotional expressions.

Improvement of decoding ability: phonological awareness and grapheme – phoneme correspondence should be supported appropriately.

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