James Britton's model of the uses of language is discussed as a way to focus and organize studies of response to literature. After the model has been explicated, specific studies are discussed in relation to a number of research areas: early forms of literary experience, the child's developing "sense of story," the child's awareness that literary forms present a "structured whole," relationships between the ways children talk about stories and Piaget's stages of cognitive development, reading interests, and the nature of mental "representations of experience." (Author)