Assessment of the Payam-e-Noor University Student's Attitudes to TwoPoems By Forouq Farokhzad and Ahmad Shamlou

Although literary texts are extensively taught at schools and universities, to date the attitude of Iranian students towards literary texts has remainedunderstudied. Taking this research gap into account, the writers of the present article adopted a descriptive-analytical approach and examined a sample of student's attitudes towards Persian contemporary poems. Taking Vala (2011) theoretical model, three concepts, i.e. evaluation, comprehensibility, and impressiveness are considered. Next, two poems including"Remember the flight, the bird is mortal" by ForouqFarokhzad, and "Abyss" penned by Ahmad Shamlou are selected and used to design a researcher-made questionnaire. 120 students of Humanities read the poems and answered the questions. The findings indicated that the participants evaluate the level of the poems higher than the mean. They stated that the poems are comprehensible and fairly express their emotions. Analyzing the data with respect to the gender variable showed that the male and female participants have quite the same attitude concerning the evaluation and impressiveness of the poems, but a significant difference was noticed in comprehensibility as the female participants believed that the poems are more complex. The subjects maintained that "Abyss" was more complex than"Remember flight, the bird is mortal". The subjects selected "loneliness" and "despotism" as the key concepts of the poems of Farokhzad and Shamlou respectively. We believe that measuring the attitudes of language users towards literary works contributes to the educational syllabus design and opens a novel horizon in the interdisciplinary studies with the emphasis on Persian language and literature.