Foregrounding and refamiliarization: understanding readers' response to literary texts

TLDR

The study examines how foregrounding influences defamiliarization and refamiliarization in literature and engineering students, focusing on their reactions to text segments, the strategies they employ, and the role of feeling. Participants read a short story while researchers applied a pause protocol, combining quantitative and qualitative analyses to assess their responses. Readers who appreciate formal elements of the text shift from decoding to reflective interpretation, thereby gaining new perspectives on the world and themselves.

Abstract

The present study investigates the effects of foregrounding on the process of defamiliarization of students of literature and engineering, and on the way they develop refamiliarization, that is, the reconstructive process they undergo in order to return to familiar ground. It describes which refamiliarizing strategies these readers make use of and the role of feeling in this process. Data analysis is both quantitative and qualitative. The introspective method of the pause protocol is used in the qualitative part. Here, participants respond to the reading of a short story. The purpose is to investigate how they react to its content and which of its segments trigger comments. Results demonstrate that appreciating the formal elements of a text might be an effective strategy, as readers do not try to decode the text any longer and start reflecting on it, thus building an interpretation. They also develop a new perspective on the world around them and on themselves.