Licealne (prze)boje z ironią, czyli skąd się biorą trudności w interpretacji tekstów ironicznych

Abstract

The author of the article concentrates on identifying the causes of incorrect reading of ironic texts by secondary school pupils. She points to the main features of ironic speech in literature, and identifies the stages of recognizing irony in a literary work. Irony is placed in the cultural context, as without understanding irony it is impossible to understand the contemporary world. The analysis of the results of the research, conducted among pupils preparing to take the Polish Matura examination and the international graduation exam, enables identification of the main reasons of incorrect reading of ironic texts. These reasons are: lack of the knowledge of the context; lack of interpretive tools to analyse the text, including clumsiness of the language used to describe literature; lack of the knowledge of, or misunderstanding the sender-addressee relations in the text; interpreting individual metaphors regardless of the whole text; and lack of precision in naming the phenomena present in poetry, especially those presuming ambiguity. An essential conclusion is that the quality of reading ironic texts is not influenced by the curriculum itself (either Polish or international), but by the didactic activities preceding the work on the ironic text. Acquiring the notions of the literary theory is a process that should occur inductively, not deductively. The final methodological proposal shows how translating a poetic text into a foreign language may serve the inductive shaping of the notion of irony.