Channels, Fall 2017

Page 16 Montgomery • Linguistic Self-Awareness Schill (2015), it may be possible to predict that participants in the survey would have a higher preference for Longfellow’s work. Although Dalvean’s tool is helpful as a guideline, it is limited in that shorter poems receive a less “accurate” score. This issue is not unforeseen, however, and is therefore not problematic; the scores are only a rough guideline for this study’s purposes. Therefore, it remains appropriate to use the tool. For the second method, the aforementioned poems were placed in a simple, ten-question survey, and participants were asked to rank the poems from one to ten, with one being their favorite and ten being their least favorite. The survey was sent to college students, and the results were compared to Dalvean’s scores of each of the poems. One of the issues inherent in a survey is the indirect targeting of a particular demographic, which is why the focus of this study was limited to college students. The relationship with poetry has shifted in the age of the internet, creating many self-proclaimed poets and poetry readers. The artistic pretense that often surrounds poetry also could be problematic, so participants were asked to rank their favorites, not which poem they thought was best. This distinction, though seemingly arbitrary, serves to shift the conversation to one of preference rather than intrinsic artistic value. The third method of data collection built on the other two. Six college-aged individuals who had taken the survey were interviewed briefly and asked why they ranked the poems as they did. The participants were all between the age of 18 and 22, from a variety of majors. The goal of these questions (see Appendix 3) was to observe the frequency with which individuals cited explicitly linguistic reasons (i.e. “I liked the rhyme” or “I liked this word choice”) as opposed to broader, nonlinguistic reasons (i.e. “This spoke to me” or “This reminded me of something”). Participants were also asked if they described themselves as people who actively sought out poetry. Again, the framing on such a question may seem a bit odd, but framing it more directly would be to load the question: Many people would say they like poetry; few would say they look for it. Finally, individuals were also asked what their primary source of poetic exposure was, which was telling in terms of revealing the interviewees’ understanding of the genre. Each interview was less than ten minutes and participant-driven as much as possible to prevent the data from being skewed by the inadvertent introduction of explicitly linguistic questions. Through the triangulated approach to the research, utilizing Dalvean’s scores, simple surveys, and interviews, it seemed probable that the data would clearly highlight patterns if any existed. After some evaluation, it became apparent that such was the case, and the results are described below. Data For the most part, the data collected was reflective of the hypothesis presented and the research previously completed. The Dalvean scores were more varied than expected, but the results of the survey were as consistent as initially predicted. The interviews with those who had participated in the survey were quite revealing, and they fleshed out the data as anticipated.