A study investigated whether fourth graders recall different amounts of information for passages of different emotional orientation, whether there is a relationship between their emotional response to the passage and the amount of information recalled, and whether they recall different relationships when they read passages of different emotional…

Reading is best understood as a dialectic process where the influence of reader and text are constantly merging to create a jointly produced and evolving understanding. What occurs as the reader and text come together during reading is similar in form to a dialogue, a model for the reader-text relationship that has not been explored in the reader…

Decontextualization, referring to the abstraction of a written text from all of its contexts, is a flawed concept. Rather than viewing writing as an isolated abstraction, a text's involvement with the human world should be acknowledged. Two major questions arise when dealing with the concept of decontextualization: (1) Can written discourse be…

Discusses ways to teach modern plays and poetry, using a reader response approach that makes the works more accessible to students. (HTH)

Argues that children may have difficulty in learning to read because the print in their books is designed to be looked at rather than read, or because theories about a need for uniformity and simplicity result in letter shapes that are hard to distinguish or to remember. (RS)

Argues that one way to investigate the relationship of text to story taker (reader or listener) is to compare how the writer has made the story to how the story taker has recreated the story. Indicates a resonance between the story taker's retelling and the original text. (RAE)

Presents three strategies for teaching the personal, operational, and cultural dimensions of literary response. (MM)

Describes a writing activity in which children in England wrote letters to various children's authors. Discusses the content of both the children's letters and the author's replies. (MM)

Investigates the effects of breakdowns in referential and factual coherence on text comprehension and reveals that the processing of factually inconsistent information hindered other information in passages. (FL)

Discusses using reader response instead of standard literature interpretation teaching methods for the study of adolescent literature in high schools. Asserts that this method gives authority to the students as reader because they must assume responsibility for understanding the text, themselves, and the world. (SRT)

Offers a method of using reader response theory that emphasizes the expectations about a text and how those expectations are fulfilled or deflated. Specifically, students read traditional fables, fairy tales, and parables, and compare them to contemporary works such as Kafka's "Metamorphosis" and Marquez's "The Very Old Man With Enormous Wings."…

Reviews the censorship debate in light of three underlying assumptions: (1) reading influences the opinions and beliefs of the reader; (2) the effect of a book, article, or passage is universal, implying there is one correct meaning for a particular work; and (3) the effects of reading are context independent. (SRT)

Presents the background, design, research, and possible uses for the Cloze Story Map, which combines the elements of cloze with a story-mapping strategy to represent the structure and semantic content of both narrative and expository text. (FL)

Explores the tenets of both the New Criticism and reader response criticism, and concludes that there is a need for a new imperative in criticism that conceives literary understanding in terms of a communication process in which both text and reader are granted importance. (FL)

Explores the possibility that literary theorists and reading researchers are unconscious of each others interests, goals, and assumptions. Seeks to explore how the gaps between these two areas might best be bridged. (EL)