TITLE The Perception of the Cause-Effect Relationship among Fairy-Tale Motifs. PUB DATE 2000-07-00

The traditional treatment of literary texts in Slovene schools took place in the form of a search for the "true message " of the literary work. The new Slovene literary didactics assumes that the teacher no longer explains to the student the meaning of this or that literary work. Rather he/she knows that the literary work can be comprehended only within the range of the immanent horizon of expectation. The teacher can provide the structure, the directions, and the possibilities or outlines (for discussion about literature), but the real link in the literary class is the link between the author and the reader. Full reception does require the understanding of the literary work, the perception of a large enough number of textual indicators--too large a gap between the author's and reader's code of comprehension can prevent or at least reduce the intensity of the literary aesthetic experience. A study explored the perception of the cause-effect relationship in the reception of the fairy tale in the period of concrete intellectual operations. Of the children questioned about "The Golden Bird" by Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm, only 68 % perceived and understood the cause-effect relationship and completed a task with sentence parts correctly. Findings show that the perception of cause-effect relationships between motifs necessitates a certain level of syntactic-linguistic development, which not all children attain at the same time. (Contains 19 notes and 13 references.) (NKA) Reproductions supplied by EDRS are the best that can be made from the original document