| Abstract
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Poetry is a genre that supports all aspects of literacy-reading, writing, listening, and speaking, and it is the first to which most children are exposed through motherly lullabies. Yet, while many studies have been conducted on prose comprehension, there is little empirical research on poetry comprehension, and none published on the specific operations elementary students with learning disabilities (LD) utilize in understanding poems. The purpose of this study is to describe the interpretive operations used by elementary students with and without LD in comprehending poetry. The demonstrated operations of the students with LD were also compared and contrasted with those of their average-achieving (AA) peers. Additionally, the research sought to determine if the level of difficulty students may have experienced in their interactions with the poems impacted their enjoyment and appreciation of them. Participants were 16 fifth and sixth graders with LD and 16 of their AA peers (n=32), matched by grade level, gender, and ethnicity. Students individually listened to two tape-recorded poems from different eras, while following along on personal scripts, and then orally answers questions about the poems. The interpretive operations were inferred through the analysis of students' responses. Additional data were gathered from an introductory interview, student interruptions, and pencil representations. Students with LD effectively used as many interpretive operations as their AA peers, adopted an aesthetic stance to reading, and performed more like experts than novices in integrating subject matter and style to enhance their comprehension and interpretation of the poems. Furthermore, the difficulty of the poems did not appear to have affected the students' enjoyment of them. However, though identifying figurative devices and their functions, students with LD were confounded by an extended metaphor and rarely moved beyond the "plain sense" of the more difficult poem. The results suggest that for elementary students, and particularly those with LD, poetry may not be as formidable a subject as some may imagine.
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