Wordsworth's poem A complaint (1806), and Harper Lee's paragraph randomly taken from her (1960) novel To kill a Mockingbird. Each text was presented twice, ...
READING POETRY AND ESL STUDENTS’ SURFACE INFORMATION RECALL
Gender and
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MOHAMED A. YACOUB
INDIANA UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA
ABSTRACT
RESEARCH QUESTIONS AND HYPOTHESIS
This study aims at measuring ESL students’ recalling surface information of a poetic form compared to the same information in a prose form. The paper seeks to explore if there is a significant difference in the amount of surface information that is recalled by second language students when reading a text in poetic or prose graphic form. In this study, I mean by surface information: word order, word choice, prepositions, and grammatical structures. These features, although might not seem important, are critical to learning a language and/or recalling a text accurately. Two texts were presented to ESL participants (N=54), Wordsworth’s poem A complaint (1806), and Harper Lee’s paragraph randomly taken from her (1960) novel To kill a Mockingbird. Each text was presented twice, one time in its original genre, either poetry or prose, and the other time manipulated into the other genre. There were three major findings in this study. First, there was no significant difference found between ESL students recalling information given in poetic or prose forms, when both texts in their four versions were tested combined. Second, however, when a paired T-test run for only Wordsworth’s poem, there was a significant difference (P=.051), participants recalled more surface information from the traditional poem format. Third, no significant difference was found for Lee’s text (P= .683).
REVIEW OF LITERATURE This topic has not had enough attention from scholars in the field of applied linguistics and creative writing. It has had enough attention from scholars of the medical field, as the search engines tell. Surface information has even been less attended to due to a common belief that content is what matters, not the surface. However, both, indeed, matter. Surface information can improve students’ outputs: speaking and writing, and it is an indication of the reader’s ability to transform the recalled information into a solid source of output. Anyhow, there are three theories that explain information recall: A) The processing shift hypothesis: This hypothesis suggests that if a reader makes a big amount of shifts within a text, newer shifted to surface information tends to replace the older shifted from surface information. A) The recoding hypothesis: This hypothesis suggests that once surface information has been integrated into a bigger structure, the older surface information tends to be lost. A) Poetry reading hypothesis: Hanauer (1997) suggested a third hypothesis that can explain the ability of surface information recall. He named it the “poetry reading hypothesis” in which he assumed that the reading of poetry involves “paying close attention to the surface features of the text for comprehension purposes at the initial encoding stage of reading. This hypothesis further assumes that the traditional graphic form of the poem will be easily accessible for this type of strategic reading” (Hanauer. 1997). This study was inspired by this hypothesis and seeks to accept or reject it. In what follows I give an overview of the studies that were conducted in regards to information recall. The reason why I present my literature review part in such a table is that it may enhance the process of recalling it by the readers. Reviewing the previous studies in a table of three columns (author/date, question, and findings) helps readers encode the information and recall it easier. Author/date
Research question
Method
Findings
David Hanauer (1997)
Does the reading of poetry involve paying close attention to the surface features of the text for comprehension purposes?
80 L1 participants were given two poems to read. Every poem was given twice: as poem once and as a prose the other time. Participants were then given recall tasks.
Participants significantly recalled more information from the poems given as poems than the information that was given in prose-like form.
Hope et al. (2014)
Asl et al. (2015)
Nguyen et al. (2016)
Roberts et al. (2016)
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Does note taking aid designed to follow the trial structure facilitate enhanced performance on a subsequent recall task? Do feelings of happiness and sadness make significant difference when recalling information by children and adolescents with major depressive disorder (MDD)?
Do websites that are tailored to individual preferences for the mode of information presentation have effect on younger and older adults’ recall of information?
Does applying educational testing approaches to an informed consent video for a medical procedure lead to greater recall of the information presented?
58 participants watched trial videos and took notes; the control group did not take any notes.
Note taking enhances the process of recall. Those who took note recalled significantly more information than those who did not. 28 children (aged 11 to Information stimulated by 17) and adolescents of sadness tend to be mothers with MDD, 28 remembered more by children and adolescents children and adults who with MDD, and 29 suffer from MDD; healthy controls were information stimulated by given 45 random words happiness tend to be recalled to remember after the more by healthy children. presentation in five There was no significant minutes. difference in recalling neutral information by all the groups. 559 younger (25-45) and older (≥ 65) participants were presented with information in mode tailored and non-tailored websites, and then they were given recall tasks.
120 participants were randomly assigned to watch a 20-min video on informed consent. Participants were then given multiple-choice recall task
Older adults recalled information that were in mode‐tailored condition and improved their attention to the contents of the website, but not younger adults. Younger adults tended to recall more information for the information that was presented in a nontailored condition, i.e., text only or text with illustrations. Providing informed consent information through a video significantly increased recall and retention of this information
This paper attempts to answer the following questions: 1. Does poetic form enhance the ability of second language learners to recall specific surface information? 2. Is there a significant difference in the amount of surface information that is recalled by second language students when reading a text in poetic or prose graphic form? Hypothesis: H₀: There will be no significant difference between ESL students’ recalling surface information given in poetic form and the same information given in prose form H1: There will be a significant difference between ESL students’ recalling surface information given in poetic form and the same information given in prose form.
RESULTS CHART Significance Chart of the findings
0.8 0.7 0.6 0.5 0.4 0.3
STUDY DESIGN AND METHODS
0.2 0.1
An online survey was created, using Qualtrics, to measure the amount of information that ESL students can recall in poetic and prose forms. Participants (N= 54) who met the inclusion criteria (age 18+, and ESL) were asked to read two texts that were given two times, that is a total of four texts; each text was given in a poetic form one time and in a prose form the other time. The length of text one was 77 words, and text two was 74 words. Text one was part of William Wordswoth’s (1806) poem A Complaint. Text two was a paragraph randomly taken from Harper Lee’s (1960) To Kill a Mockingbird. Three L2 teachers of English, who all were PhD candidates in TESOL or Literature at the time of conducting the study and who came from three different teaching backgrounds, were asked to rate the level of the texts. Two rated Wordsworth’s poem to be intermediate in level (i.e., can be comprehended by intermediatelevel students), and one rated it to be advanced. The three rated Lee’s text to be lower-intermediate. Qualtrics option of “randomization” was implemented so that texts would appear in different order for each participant. After each text was shown to the participants, they had to click “Next” to see the questions. Once they click next, they could no more go back to the text. Four multiple-choice questions followed each text; each question had four possible answers, from which only one matches the text exactly. Students were asked the following question: Which of the following utterances appeared in the text that you just read? In choosing your phrase it is important that you choose the phrase that EXACTLY MATCHES the words that were in text. The four questions yielded to measure the ability to recall the following: preposition, word choice, word order, and grammatical structure, respectively.
RESULTS AND DISCUSSION The right answers for each participant were counted and descriptive analysis were run. The results were as follows
0 All texts (.249)
W.worth's poem Lee's Text (.683) (.051)
Male/female (0.23)
This chart above shows the significant or the non-significant difference of the paired t-tests that were run for the texts. There was no significant difference for all texts combined (P= .249), there was a significant difference for Wordsworth’s poem (P= .051), and there was no significant difference for Lee’s text (P= .683). There was also no significant difference between male and female participants (P= .249) in recalling the surface information.
CONCLUSION AND RECOMMENDATIONS This study was set to measure ESL students’ recalling surface information of a poetic form compared to the same information in a prose form. The paper sought to explore if there was a significant difference in the amount of surface information (preposition, word choice, word order, and grammatical structure used) that was recalled by second language students after reading a text in poetic or prose graphic form. Two texts were presented to ESL participants (N=54), Wordsworth’s poem A complaint (1806), and Harper Lee’s paragraph randomly taken from her (1960) novel To kill a Mockingbird. Each text was presented twice, one time in its original genre, either poetry or prose, and the other time manipulated into the other genre. There were three major findings in this study. First, there was no significant difference found between ESL students recalling information given in poetic or prose forms, when both texts in their four versions were tested combined. Second, however, when a paired T-test run for only Wordsworth’s poem, there was a significant difference (P=.051), participants recalled more surface information from the traditional poem format. Third, no significant difference was found for Lee’s text (P= .683). Findings one and three do not reject the null hypothesis, whereas finding three rejects the null hypothesis. This second result comes in accordance with Hanauer’s (1997) study in which he tested the assumptions of the poetry reading hypothesis by setting up recall tasks for 80 subjects who were presented with one of two poems in a traditional or prose graphic form. The results of his study supported the poetry reading hypothesis in that it showed a significant difference in the amount of verbatim information that his L1 participants recalled from the traditional graphic format and the manipulated format. It is recommended that more research be done on this area so that we have more evidence to either accept or reject Reading Poetry Hypothesis.
REFERENCES
Table 1 Descriptive analysis of the total correct answers correct poetry N
correct prose
Valid
37
35
Missing
17
19
4.08
3.77
1.706
1.880
Skewness
.222
-.015
Std. Error of Skewness
.388
.398
Minimum
1
0
Maximum
7
7
Mean Std. Deviation
As can be seen above in table 1, the mean for correct answers of poetry M = 4.08 in the four texts for each participant (N=54) is higher than the mean for the prose M = 3.77. However, the difference was only .31. There were three major findings: First, a paired sample t test indicated that there was no significant difference (t (33) = 1.17, p = .249, d= .20) between ESL students’ recalling information given in poetic or prose forms. This finding was for the two texts in their four versions combined.
Asl, A. F., Ghanizadeh, A., Mollazade, J., & Aflakseir, A. (2015). Differences of biased recall memory for emotional information among children and adolescents of mothers with MDD, children and adolescents with MDD, and normal controls. Psychiatry Research, 228(2), 223-227 Hanauer, D. (1997). Reading Poetry and Surface Information Recall. In S. b. Tötösy de Zepetnek, I. Sywenky (Eds.) , The Systemic and Empirical Approach to Literature and Culture as Theory and Application (pp. 453-469).
Hanauer, D. (1995). The Effects of Educational Background on Literary and Poetic Text Categorization Judgements. In G.Rusch (Ed.), Empirical Approaches to Literature. Siegen: LUMIS Publications. Hanauer, D. (1996). Integration of Phonetic and Graphic Features in Poetic Text Categorization Judgements. Poetics, 23, 363-380. Hope, L., Eales, N., & Mirashi, A. (2014). Assisting jurors: Promoting recall of trial information through the use of a trial-ordered notebook. Legal & Criminological Psychology, 19(2), 316-331. Jakobson, R. (1960). Linguistics and poetics. In T. Sebeok (ed.) Style in Language. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Mukarovsky, J. (1964). Standard language and poetic language. In P. Garvin (Trans.) A Prague School Reader on Esthetics, Literary Structure, and Style. Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press.
Second, students significantly (t (32) = 2.02, P = .051, d= .35) recalled more information from Wordsworth’s poem than the information they recalled from the manipulated version of the same poem, i.e., the prose one. This finding rejects the null hypothesis and aligns with the theory of poetry reading that indicates that readers pay more attention to the surface features of the poems when poems are represented as traditional poems, i.e., in phonetic and graphic representation.
Murphy,G.L., & Shapiro, A.M. (1994). Forgetting verbatim information in discourse. Memory & Cognition, 22 (1), 85-94.
Third, there was no significant difference (t (33) = .412, P = .683, d = .070) in Lee’s text in both versions, the poetic and the prose forms.
Roberts, K. J., Revenson, T. A., Urken, M. L., Fleszar, S., Cipollina, R., Rowe, M. E., & ... Lepore, S. J. (2016). Testing with feedback improves recall of information in informed consent: A proof of concept study. Patient Education And Counseling, 99(8), 1377-1381.
One of the minor findings was that there was no significant difference between male (N= 20, and M=3.95) and female (N= 13, and M= 4.69) participants in recalling information from poetic or prose forms. The difference was only .74, which is not significant.
Nguyen, M. H., Weert, J. M., Bol, N., Loos, E. F., Tytgat, K. J., Ven, A. H., & Smets, E. A. (2016). Tailoring the mode of information presentation: Effects on younger and older adults' attention and recall of online information. Human Communication Research.
