First love letter to conflicting marriages: exploration of ethnically diverse students’ developing understanding during their reading of Romeo and Juliet using schema theory

This article presents the findings of a linguistic ethnographic pilot study, conducted as part of an ongoing research study, to examine how students utilise their knowledge and experience in understanding literary texts being studied from different cultural and temporal spaces. The analysis of this development in the students’ comprehension of new concepts during their learning of William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, was conducted in an inner city, ethnically diverse East Midlands school, and drew on schema theory and conceptual blending. These frameworks were used to track the development of understanding of novel concepts such as love, with the findings demonstrating the students’ enriched comprehension by combining concepts they are familiar with to create a new conception. Here, the focus was on how activities conducted in the classroom, such as short writing tasks and classroom discussions, encouraged students to reflect on such combining or merging of concepts which draws on vital relations which provides an alternative way to perceive ideas.