On the interplay of discursive practives and literary text comprehension

A multi-perspective view of microlevel and macrolevel navigation processes in German literature lessons

Abstract

It is still a desideratum to describe the interplay between processes of literary comprehension and discursive practices for classroom discussion. This desideratum is addressed in the article from an integrative perspective, taking up perspectives from both language and literature education research. Starting from considerations on prompts which can be considered fruitful for literary understanding as well as from insights into the central role of discursive practices (such as reasoning and describing) for learning processes, we present an integrative heuristic for describing navigations in educational literary dialogue and illustrate these heuristics by referring to two contrastive cases from dialogue in the same grade (i. e. grade 6) on the same poem (“Circus Child” by Rose Ausländer). Through the approach presented, which combines different perspectives, we both demonstrate and reflect on the teachers’ navigations in relation to literary comprehension and discursive practices at both macro- and micro levels. On the basis of the explorative observations, implications are drawn for conducting educational literary discussions that are both textually adequate and adaptive to students’ needs.