The Gendered Envisionments Of Reading The Poet X : Understanding Students' Meaning Making in Swedish EFL Classrooms

Abstract: This essay applies theories from gender studies and reader response to Elizabeth Acevedo’s The Poet X (2018). The essay discusses diversity in meaning making by investigating differences in creating envisionments. The aim is to unmask the differences in reading to improve and direct teaching practices in EFL classrooms. Moreover, an additional aim is to discuss whether envisionment can be seen as a gendered concept, or if the different readings are equally possible to reach Langer’s five stances. The Poet X centres on a female first-person narrator where the critique towards church, society and normative behaviour is prominent. The potential differences can be seen in understanding the characters in the novel, relating to previous experience and differing understandings of social structures. The pedagogical implementation aims at designing a learning situation where these differing understandings of text can be shared through metacognitive reflection and open-ended methods of pedagogy. The shared understanding of The Poet X in EFL settings can develop the students’ ability to find agency in interpretating texts.