The effect of teaching intertextuality to high school students on performance on multiple text responses to literature

Abstract

The study examines if intertextuality, the awareness of links and the elaboration of those links, can be taught using a particular methodology. The subjects were two groups of Grade 11 students (n = 35) who read, annotated, discussed, and wrote reader-responses about multiple aesthetic texts, the primary intervention being the use of intertextual questions to guide student learning and response in relation to the texts used in the study. Pretest and posttest data was analyzed according to an analysis of variance with repeated measures. The study demonstrates that intertextual linking and elaboration are very difficult for students and that intertextual teaching, as presented by the study, may not be sufficient to overcome such difficulty.