Evaluative comprehension for poetry with parody poems

This paper presents an examination of evaluative comprehension of poetry reading using parody poems. Teachers using poetry in foreign language teaching tend to emphasize literal comprehension and inferential comprehension. They jump suddenly to appreciative comprehension. Foreign language learners have difficulty enjoying evaluative comprehension of poetry reading because they lack a firm background with which to evaluate a poetry text’s textual features. Comprehension at this level, however, is important because it draws learners’ attention to textual features such as the writer’s linguistic style; it also enables learners to discuss the success and attractiveness of a text. Both are common topics for discussion of literary works in the mother tongue. This paper presents examination of a type of parody poems which has a strong intertextual relation with the original poem at the linguistic level, demonstrating that such poems can be useful foreign language teaching materials with which learners can evaluate poetry