A year-long holistic study of literary responses was conducted to determine the effects of using a transactive literary paradigm in secondary school English classrooms. (The transactive--for transactional--paradigm emphasizes the reader's involvement with a text and the reader's use of personal experiences to extract meaning from texts.) Participants in the study were four teachers and their tenth grade students. The 93 students in four of the classes were taught within a curriculum applying transactive theory to classroom practices (nondirective teaching strategies involving public conversation, private conversation, and free association), while another 98 students in four other classes received traditional literary instruction. Observations and teacher self-reports revealed changes in questioning patterns, teachers' responses to responses, and teachers' acceptance of personal responses to texts. Measures of students' changes in reading achievement, attitude toward literature, and cognitive maturity revealed the following: (1) no significant differences in reading achievement between experimental and control groups, (2) significantly improved attitudes toward literature by students in the experimental classes, (3) and no significant difference between the experimental and control groups in cognitive maturity. (RL)