Improving reading comprehension with the help of Christian spiritual texts

Abstract

The inclusion of valuable works of sacred literature in teaching literature and language can serve a discovery-oriented purpose. In connection with teaching sacred (religious) literature, a basic requirement is to present students with various sacred texts as well as their possible interpretations and methods of textual analysis, both in classroom and individual pedagogical settings. In addition to the coherence that creates the internal value system of literary works, it is also necessary to illuminate the components that establish external coherence and the factors that organise networks of meaning related to intertext and intertextuality.

Attention to intertextuality is important because the poem Jesus and the Cross, which stands at the centre of this study, is both a literary and a rhetorical phenomenon: beyond its literal meaning, it also alludes to the Gospels of the New Testament. Their elements are incorporated into Sándor Sík’s work, providing the reader with additional layers of meaning and placing the literary text in a broader cultural context.

Is this a matter of fashion, self-serving moralisation, or the outpouring of Christian spirituality? In differentiated skills development, Sándor Sík’s poem Jesus and the Cross may occupy a prominent place, allowing the multiplicity of possible interpretations to be fruitfully exploited.

The presented literary analysis tasks are organised along contemplative (reflective), additive, and functional (application-oriented) reading comprehension strategies; they clearly constitute creative–productive, task-based sets of classroom and extracurricular activities. Contemporary methodological culture in language and literature teaching becomes truly viable in pedagogical practice when, alongside demonstrating the linguistic–stylistic and generic–aesthetic importance and significance of texts, the strategy of learning through reflective thinking is also applied.