Saudi Students’ Perceptions of Schemata and Poetry Comprehension

Abstract

In teaching poetry, one of the first problems to be addressed is the lack of appropriate schemata when studying English and American poetic texts. The current study inquires about the students’ perception regarding how Saudi students perceive the relationship between the lack of appropriate schemata and the comprehension of English and American poetry to explain how they read and interpret poems in English and how they respond to the culturally loaded texts by writers with different cultural schemata to provide a greater understanding of the challenges they face in the poetry classroom. The study also examines students’ openness to schema activation techniques within the poetry classroom. A qualitative and quantitative research study has been conducted in three undergraduate classrooms at King Saud University. The research included open questions and questionnaire data obtained over a one year period (2018-2019) from 51 students. The results show that Saudi students’ are very much aware of the problematic issues in their reading and believe social and cultural ideologies have a significant influence on comprehension based on their individual experience. Only a third of the respondents do not find social and cultural ideologies and references to be problematic. Furthermore, 49% of the respondents feel that having a different background affects their ability to identify with the poems. The study also showed that students are open to incorporating schema activating techniques to improve their comprehension of English and American poetry.