Students’ Reconstructive Imagination and Literary Text Comprehension

Abstract

The purpose of the study is to define the connection between the reconstructive imagination and the comprehension of the text, in particular, with the comprehension of its constituent words. On the basis of the methodology “Switch on your imagination”, schoolchildren of the 4th-10th forms (396 people) were asked to give a verbal description of mental images and make a drawing for the text. As a stimulus material, we used an excerpt from the novel by A. S. Pushkin «Eugene Onegin». As a result of three stages of the experiment: а) presentation of the text without semantics of words, b) with semantics and c) introduction into the historical and cultural context, evidence was obtained that the comprehension and the reconstructive imagination in the perception of a literary text is a unified mental process, and fullfledged work of both processes is based primarily on the historical and cultural experience, without which the perception of a literary text is often difficult or even impossible.