This article uses the findings from an empirical study on Hong Kong students' reading practices as collected through face-to-face interviews on major university campuses in Hong Kong to argue for the importance of "affective" and "imaginative" engagement with literary texts if students are to develop an interest in reading.…

Discusses some concrete examples of the kinds of conflicts that can surface when reader-response theory is actually practiced in the classroom, and considers some of the implications. Urges instructors to make room for contesting views and to facilitate serious, committed, personal interchanges. (MS)

Argues that students develop new reading strategies in order to construct meaning from electronic text. Discusses why reading electronic text is different, and argues that there is historical precedence for this shifting role of the reader. Outlines strategies for helping students reflect on the differences between hypertext and traditional text…

During the past 15 years, a fundamental change has taken place in literary criticism, with a decline in New Criticism (literature viewed as a public object) and an increase in reader response criticism (literature viewed as a private experience). New Critics considered the meaning of a literary text to exist within the text as an independent and…

Describes a method used to teach freshman students how to make research a conscious part of their reading and writing processes, by helping them use their personal associations with a text and their questions about a text, to compose meaning and become conscious of the activities they are performing. (HTH)

Examines the effects of increasing adolescents' awareness of their own response strategies to reading. Illustrates the importance of ensuring that all students discover for themselves not only what they have learned, but how they have learned it. (SR)

Describes sentence collecting, an activity in which students do outside reading that may include content area textbooks, and bring to class interesting sentences found in their reading. Maintains that sentence collecting helps to model reading as a dynamic cognitive and social process in which readers participate actively. (SR)

Examines tasks provided for students in most literature textbooks used in the United States, noting that these tasks typically control students' responses to literature. Relates these tasks to current theory and research on the reading process. Describes activities from literature texts used in Canada that facilitate literary response. (MM)

Provides a background of response theory, two Canadian perspectives on response theory, a description of transactional response theory and response-centered curriculum, a discussion of the concepts of participant and spectator roles in literature and of the idea of narration and storying as literature, and a discussion of analysis and criticism.…

Considers what literature does, its role in a child's education, and how it might be taught. Advocates the use of adolescent literature in the classroom. (NKA)

Examines the experience of reading student writing by holding it against current views of reading from literary theory and composition studies. Describes this experience as a concentrated effort at once to read and not to "read" the student writing. (MS)

Offers an approach to text analysis that discusses what makes good writing good. Argues that good writing involves the presentation of propositions that are not too dense, in a schema that is familiar or explained carefully, requiring not much inference on the part of the reader, and in a pattern that is coherent from beginning to end. (MS)

Compares inferences about story characters' behavior, perceptions, and goals made by eighth graders, eleventh graders, college freshmen, and college seniors. Concludes that from early adolescence to young adulthood, readers shift from conceptions of characters in terms of immediate surface feelings and behaviors to conceptions in terms of…

Analyzes how two groups of eighth graders and their teacher create literary texts during small group discussion, and suggests the importance of talk as a means of constructing meaning. (NKA)

Considers literature as something different from the texts themselves (specifically, a way of reading that includes the writer, the text, and the reader) so that the purposes of teachers and readers may be considered, and a flexible approach to selection, organization, and pedagogy be permitted. (SRT)