Comprehension of atypical literary text and scholastic achievement

Abstract

With the aim of gaining insight into literary text comprehension and the linkage between that comprehension and scholastic achievement during the first years of schooling, a research was conducted on the sample of 152 third and fourth grade pupils from one urban and one rural school. After having read silently a selected atypical excerpt from one literary text, interviewed pupils filled out the questionnaire constructed for the purposes of this research starting from the 11 categories of text comprehension singled out based on the theory of comprehension and interpretation of literary text and the current curriculum. In the first part of the research we applied the Children's orientation scale by Malka Margalit, and school marks were used as a measurement of scholastic achievement. Research results point out that, among other things, inferring on the basis of what has been read poses the greatest difficulty for third and fourth graders, that is, that almost three quarters of them are not capable of determining the meaning of some representative sentences from that text. In the positive sense, it was established that almost three quarters of them perceive beautiful poetic expressions and about 80% of them can at least to a certain extent recognize character descriptions, emotional situations and moods, that is, discover significant facts. Answers to the questions regarding the majority of categories of text comprehension are significantly correlated with scholastic achievement. As expected, the highest correlations between the measures on text comprehension categories are with the marks in native (Serbian) language. Partial correlations between the measures on certain categories of text comprehension and measurements of scholastic achievement (excluding the influence of feeling of coherence) are not significantly different from bivariate. Based on the obtained data, authors conclude that the utilized system of categories can be a useful tool for analyzing literary text comprehension at younger primary school age, that is, that separate observation of comprehension of (atypical) literary text can contribute to gaining a better insight into determinates of development of scholastic achievement.