Age Variable Student's Personal Characteristics and Their Reader's Preferences

The article is based on a research monitoring a relationship between personal characteristics of young readers and their poetry reading preferences. When implementing the research the semantic differential method and Q-methodology was used. The semantic differential has been adjusted in our earlier studies, when exploring poetry reception there are three factors observed in reading reactions of the respondents: comprehensibility, evaluation and impressiveness of selected poems. Q - methodology has been selected to observe the students’ relation to human values, their personality characteristics and circumstances and their views on teaching of literature, especially poetry. The older respondents (14-15 years) are more independent, more critical of the authority of parents and teachers. When compared with the younger respondents (12-13 years) they have a greater resistance to poetry, they are moody and more sensitive. The older respondents show a greater understanding of the hidden humor of the nonsense poem, referring to their own school experience and at the same time they allow Prevert's text to reach them emotionally by the image of one of the many variants of the relationship between a man and a woman. They perceive the world around them as a more complex one than then the younger respondents who were impressed by the light Japanese five verse poem Oh designed primarily for adolescent readers.