Employing Pre-reading Strategies in Enhancing Third Year College Students' Understanding of Poetry

Abstract

are often found to havedifficulties in understanding themeaning of poetic texts . This maybe attributed to the fact they do notmatch the new information with theone existing in their minds. Hence ,it seems necessary to dig in thestrategies that can be employed toenhance understanding andcomprehending of poetic texts astaught in the third year stage ,College of Education/ Ibn Rushd ,Department of English. This papertends to explore the effect of usingpre-reading strategies ( such as:word splash, key words , pre-writequestions , storyimpression ,pictures , do-now , think-pair- share, KWL chart and I-search )on thecollege students' understanding ofpoetry.Sixty students are selected tobe the sample of the study ,dividedinto two equal groups : 30representing the experimental (following the pre-reading strategiesin teaching poetry) and 30representing the control ( followingthe traditional way of teachingpoetry) . After conducting theprocess of equalizing these groupsin terms of factors such as age , sex, level of parents' education , it hasbeen found that students ofexperimental group perform better inactivities related to comprehendingpoetic texts . The pre-readingstrategies motivate students to beenthusiastically engaged inproblems of interpreting andexplaining the meaning of poetry.Moreover , they appear to be moreactive and ready to solve problemsof Staiger ( 1973:37 ) contendsthat reading is essentially acognitive process "during whichthe reader not only comprehendsideas found in a text but alsointerprets and evaluates them.Expressed another way, readingis the most crucial of the fourlanguage skills comprehendingpoetr 1.0 Introductionfor EFL learners ,asit enables them to gain exposureto the target language andreceive valuable linguistic input tobuild language proficiency.Readers often need to go throughan active process rather thansimply decoding the graphicrepresentation . For this,Anderson (1999:1) states that :Reading is an active, fluentprocess which involves thereaderand the reading material inbuilding meaning. Meaningdoes not reside on the printedpage ,synergy occurs in readingwhich combines the words onthe printed page with thereader's background knowledgeand experiences.In the same vein, Ur ( 1996:138 ) argues that reading meansreading and understanding .Reading the words, not knowingwhat they mean, merely indicatesdecoding ( translating writtensymbols into correspondingsounds ) . To give a finerexplanation, he ( ibid ) affirmsthat reading implies the followingtips :1- perceiving and decodingletters in order to read words,2- understanding all the words inorder to understood the meaningof a text,3- gathering meaning from whatis read, and4- understanding of a text byunderstanding the words itcomposed.In brief, reading can mostly beviewed as the translation ofgraphic symbols into theircorresponding meaning whetherspoken or written. Mostdefinitions of reading seem to bebased on the idea thatcomprehension is the essence ofreading, without which no readingcan take place. In thisconnection, this paper intends toinvestigate the application ofpre-reading strategies to enhanceunderstanding poetry of the thirdyear classes.