The "Dramatizing fables" method as an instrument for comprehensive diagnostics of psychological specifics of dramatic text perception by school students
DOI: 10.23951/2307-6127-2026-4-159-169
The article addresses a pressing issue in educational psychology – the diagnosis of school students’ reading development. The research is grounded in the tenets of cultural-historical psychology, which views understanding as a complex, mediated activity of the individual. A literary genre, as a historically developed construct, is interpreted as a specific cultural tool (L.S. Vygotsky) that organizes the reader’s perception and guides their interpretative activity along a trajectory intended by the author. The most challenging genre for perception is drama. The formal and substantive features of dramatic texts cause difficulties for students, preventing them from comprehending a literary work at a conceptual level. The lack of developed generalized ways of acting (V.V. Davydov) related to decoding dramatic works hinders students’ ability to overcome naïve-realistic perception and reconstruct the author’s position through a comprehensive analysis of the elements of form and content. As a solution to this problem, the article proposes the “Dramatizing Fables” method. A high level of reading development is associated with the ability for creative transformation of the source text. Therefore, this method assesses the formation of the reader’s generalized ways of acting necessary for understanding drama through a quasiauthorial task that objectifies the process of understanding in the final product of the subjects’ activity. The article presents data confirming the validity and reliability of the proposed diagnostic tool. The value of the method lies in its ability to identify deficits in students’ reading proficiency by analyzing their ways of interacting with the text, rather than testing factual knowledge.
Keywords: activity approach, teaching literature, understanding of a literary text, understanding dramatic text, drama, early adolescence, reading skills evaluation
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Issue: 4, 2026
Series of issue: Issue 4
Rubric: PSYCHOLOGY
Pages: 159 — 169
Downloads: 118