Teksty sterujące analizą i interpretacją dzieła literackiego w szkole

Abstract

The paper deals with verbal steering texts, i.e. with sets of questions and recommendations structurally connected with each other. Their didactic function consists in the directing of the pupils’ investigation of the analysis, interpretation, and evaluation of literary production at school. The above-mentioned texts play usually a part of one of the elements of the didactive cover of a manual or a methodical guide. When constructed according to the modern needs of individualized teaching, they present to a certain extent an equivalent of labour cards (fiches de travail or travaux dirigés in French didactics, Arbeitskarten in Germ an didactics). These steering texts were very popular in Polish didactics of the interwar period. Their typology is demonstrated in the paper against the background of the development of heuristic method. This typology has been a base for the evaluating of different versions in the process of literary studies. An attempt at evaluation connected with the classification in question revealed a necessity of the construction of differentiated steering texts for any school grade which usually includes three or four levels according to the pupils’ abilities. The ascertainment due to the experience of the past as w ell as a sounding diagnostic investigation of the receipt of selected reading enabled the author of the paper to compose a set of differentiated but completing each other texts steering the analysis and interpretation of H. Sienkiewicz’s short story Sachem. These semiotic instruments, after some correction in school practice, displayed following advantages: 1) they can play an essential part in individualized teaching because they are displeacable cards differentiated as to their contents and didactic functions, 2) they perm it an individual choice of the direction of analysis and interpretation but do not nevertheless relieve the pupils from the comprehensive study of a piece of work, 3) they encourage the pupils to form a direct reader’s contact with a piece of work, 4) they influence favourably the aesthetic and investigative attitude of the readers while protecting the piece of work in question from the minuse of the instrumental and mimetic style of receipt. In spite of their numerous advantages these texts should be applied only occasionally according to the peculiar nature of a piece of work and the needs of the readers — in order to avoid the monotony and schematism during the lessons of literature.