Strategies used when reading contemporary and shakespearean poetries by english as a foreign language students

Abstract

Poetry, more than any other genre draws attentions of students and teachers. However, both students and teachers face challenges in reading and understanding poetry. Poetry for teaching English is widely adopted but understanding poetry is problematic. Reading strategies can address the problem. Therefore, this study investigated the strategies that students perceived they use, the actual strategies used and identified the different strategies that they used when they read Contemporary and Shakespearean poetries. In this research, the most common strategies that English as a Foreign Language (EFL) post-graduate students perceived they used, in comparison to what is actually used while they read poetry in English were studied. This study adopted the mixed method design which considers quantitative and qualitative data in the analysis. The instruments for data collection included a questionnaire (Survey of Poetry Reading Strategies) to identify the perceived strategies, and Think-aloud protocols to identify the actual strategies used while reading Contemporary and Shakespearean poetries. The participants were selected based on convenience random sampling. Sixty participants took part in the quantitative data collection and ten of them were purposely selected for qualitative data collection. Results from the questionnaire showed use of Problem solving strategies such as re-reading was perceived to be used more often than Global and Support strategies such as analysing and evaluating. In addition, results from the protocol showed that Global strategies were used more than the Support and Problem solving strategies. Analysis of the two types of poetry used in the study showed that readers did not use different strategies in reading them. As a conclusion, the results from the qualitative data showed that Global strategies are generally used for reading poetry. It is recommended that future research examines these strategies for reading of poetry from different era.