This study examines the role of reader emotional expression in mediating Chinese learners’ understanding of modern Korean poetry and, on this basis, proposes instructional goals and content for learner-centered modern poetry education grounded in le...
This study examines the role of reader emotional expression in mediating Chinese learners’ understanding of modern Korean poetry and, on this basis, proposes instructional goals and content for learner-centered modern poetry education grounded in learners’ agency.
The study is premised on the assumption that the linguistic and cultural backgrounds of Chinese learners as foreign language learners can function as productive resources for the multi-layered expansion of meaning in modern Korean poetry texts. Adopting a transactional view of literary understanding, in which meaning emerges through the cyclical interaction between reader and text, the study positions reader emotional expression as a core pathway through which emotions evoked during poetry reading are articulated in language and developed into poetic meaning. To this end, the study first clarifies the concept of emotion as employed in this research and defines reader emotional expression as a process-oriented experience in which learner-readers participate in poetic meaning generation by reorganizing and verbalizing emotions evoked in poetry reading in conjunction with their personal experiences. In addition, within the context of foreign language education, the study foregrounds imagination as a key condition for the emergence of emotional expression and categorizes it functionally into constructive, relational, and creative imagination, examining how each operates in the process of generating emotional expression. Building on this theoretical framework, the study conceptualizes the development of poetry comprehension through reader emotional expression as a three-stage process: the formation of poetic meaning grounded in impression-based emotional expression, the expansion of poetic meaning through interaction-based emotional expression, and the subjective generation of poetic meaning through reflective emotional expression.
Based on this theoretical discussion, the study empirically examines patterns in the development of poetry comprehension through emotional expression by analyzing learning data produced by advanced Chinese learners of Korean. The results indicate that learners’ poetry comprehension can be identified in three patterns: the formation of subjective poetic meaning through narrative construction, the multidimensional elaboration of poetic meaning through multifaceted emotional representation, and the subjectification of poetic meaning through the refinement of linguistic expression. These findings confirm that emotional expression functions as a core mechanism driving the subjective generation of poetic meaning.
On the basis of these empirical findings, the study proposes instructional goals and content for modern Korean poetry education centered on reader emotional expression. The instructional goals include enhancing learners’ capacity to construct multi-layered poetic meaning, fostering intercultural sensitivity grounded in emotional resonance, and cultivating an attitude of subjective appropriation toward modern Korean poetry. In terms of instructional content, the study suggests providing socio-cultural background information in accordance with textual characteristics, introducing stages for reflective expression in Korean, and designing pedagogical questions that promote literary appreciation, with reference to the limitations observed in learners’ actual patterns of poetry comprehension.
By focusing on the process of poetry comprehension mediated by reader emotional expression, this study clarifies, both theoretically and empirically, the potential for subjective poetry comprehension among Chinese learners and links this perspective to the design of modern Korean poetry education.