Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Price, Marian

Titel

Reader Response in the Teaching of Composition

Erscheinungsjahr

1987

Quelle

ERIC

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• As an interesting development in recent literary criticism, reader response can enhance a composition class in many ways. Reader response, by incorporating both intellect and feeling into an aesthetic reaction to literature, restores the subjective aspect that some forms of criticism deny. Three main elements compose the repeated cycle of a reader-response composition class: (1) individual readers respond to the literature in the written form of a reader's journal; (2) group discussion validates individuals' insights, with the class acting as an interpretive community; and (3) students produce essays through a process of drafting and peer review. In the final essay-writing step, the class community--not the teacher--is seen as the audience, and student writing becomes the text to be read and given a response. The reading journal and reader-response discussion help identify issues that students can explore more fully and formally in their essays. Because the reader-response model insures that individual responses are listened to and respected, it encourages involvement as readers and commitment as writers, and it discourages conformity of thought and the tendency to parrot the teacher's interpretations. (Figures of the authoritarian model and reader-response model are included, and a list of instructions for a reader's journal is appended.) (MM)