Exploring cognitive–institutional alignment in poetry comprehension: a grade 8 case study in Nepal

Abstract

Poetry is persistently perceived as more difficult than narrative prose among ESL/EFL learners, yet whether this difficulty is intrinsic to the genre or structurally mediated remains undertheorised. This study examined whether Grade 8 ESL/EFL learners’ poetry difficulty may be associated with institutional–cognitive misalignment rather than inherent genre complexity. Employing a convergent mixed-methods case study design, eleven Grade 8 students from a private school in Kathmandu, Nepal, completed controlled genre comparison tasks using thematically identical poetic and prose texts, alongside a 50-item Universal Design Learning (UDL)-aligned cognitive engagement instrument mapped onto Cattell–Horn–Carroll (CHC) domains. Within this bounded classroom context, descriptive patterns revealed a performance asymmetry: 54.54% of participants demonstrated at least partial success in prose comprehension, whereas 72.72% of participants failed the poetry task entirely. Cognitive profiling indicated a within-subject pattern of relatively higher engagement in Crystallised Knowledge and relatively lower engagement in Fluid Reasoning and Long-Term Storage and Retrieval, a domain theoretically implicated in poetic interpretation. Because the profiling instrument was purpose-built and was not designed to support between-domain psychometric comparison, this pattern is reported as a relative within-sample profile rather than as evidence of differential cognitive strength. A further metacognitive misalignment was found, suggesting a possible “brevity-as-ease heuristic”, wherein learners conflated the poetry shorter length relative to its prose with reduced cognitive demand. These patterns are consistent with a possible role for differential rehearsal of cognitive processes within a prose-dominant, examination-oriented curriculum rather than from inherent textual opacity. The study advances a provisional institutional–cognitive alignment framework to guide future large-scale investigation across examination-driven ESL/EFL contexts.

The authors' abstract, as published at the source. Language Testing in Asia, 2026 · DOI ↗