Conditions Controling the Interpretation of Literary Texts　Discovered Through the Comparison Two Teaching Styles

Abstract

A teacher at a primary school attached to a university and a teacher educator from that university taught a class of fourth graders using the same literary text, “My village is the Most Beautiful in the World.” By comparing the two teachers’ approaches and examining the differences, this paper tries to determine an acceptable range of free interpretation of a literary text and explore the issue of differences between 1) facts and textual interpretation, 2) interpretation of illustration and textual interpretation, and 3) the author’s intention and readers’ interpretations of a text. The study has revealed that the following five interpretations were intertwined in the reading activity in the class: a) the interpretation intended by the author, Yutaka Kobayashi, b) the interpretation which the text itself yielded, c) teachers’ interpretations, d) children’s interpretations and e) the interpretations yielded by our knowledge about the current situation in Afghanistan. In conclusion, the importance of relating the interpretation which the text itself yielded with children’s interpretations is emphasized.