Reader Response in Elementary Classrooms

Quest and Discovery

Nicholas J. Karolides

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781135453534
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Reading is a quest. Likened to an adventure -- both metaphoric and real -- the quest is a journey of discovery. The reader's search encompasses the sensations of the experience itself, accompanying emotions, sense and meaning engendered by the experience, and understandings of the self, others, and the world around. Out of curiosity, readers also search for an extensive array of information. The journey can be envisioned and contemplated again and again after the reading act itself is completed. In a meaningful way, the reader's quest and its discoveries are life enduring and life fulfilling. The purpose of this volume is two-fold:
* to establish and explore the essential features of reader response theory and its rendering of the reading process, and
* to acknowledge a philosophy of teaching and to illustrate teaching strategies to evoke and enhance readers' responses. Understanding the ways in which the reader affects the reading and how the reading happens will illuminate classroom pedagogy. This text establishes and explores the essential features of reader response theory and its rendering of the reading process. The essays acknowledge a philosophy of teaching and illustrate a spectrum of teaching strategies to evoke and enhance readers' responses, including whole and small-group discussion; story drama; readers' theatre; journal writing; scripts, letters, stories, and other writings; and "body punctuation." A case study format is used to illustrate these strategies in action in real classrooms.

Part I
Transactional Theory and Literature-Based Teaching

1
The Reading Process: Transactional Theory in Action

Nicholas J. Karolides

University of Wisconsin-River Falls

EDITOR’S OVERVIEW

The transactional theory of literature is the formal name for what is commonly identified as the reader-response theory or reader-response approach. This theory of reading literature is significantly influencing the teaching of literature and reading. Reader response theory is in large measure responsible for the literature-based reading curriculum that is now a major presence in elementary schools.

Recognizing the role of the reader in the reading act is the underpinning of the theory, along with the critical understanding that reading is a process. The role and functioning of the reader in this process in relation to the text is explored in detail in this chapter. How the process works and how readers achieve meaning are explained. Discussion of features of the meaning-making activity—selective attention, stance, validity, and the text itself—round out the discussion.

Two classroom scenarios demonstrate the theory in action. These, one set in the Virgin Islands, the other in the Midwest, illustrate the roles of students and teachers as they share responses to the text of a poem and an historical novel.

Consider the following:

1. With a peer, try to evaluate the selective attention factors of your reading of a children’s book. Try to imagine the variations in a class of students.
2. Search your memory to identify ways in which teachers in your past have either prescribed stance or allowed choice. How did these affect your reading? How will this awareness affect your teaching behavior?
3. The issue of validity of response is high on teachers’ concern list. In what ways does the acceptance of a range of valid interpretations affect classroom principles and practices?

The setting is a sixth-grade classroom in the Virgin Islands. The students, ringed by a group of teachers who have come to observe, are traditionally seated in rows. Robert Berlin, a master teacher then of New York University, is demonstrating the teaching of literature, specifically a poetry lesson.¹

1 Robert Berlin told the story of this teaching situation several times in my hearing. It is presented here as a recollection of his experience. Although the developmental sequence and key attributes of the discussion are true, the specific dialogue and students’ names are invented. I also want to honor Bob for what I learned from his experience and from his teaching.

The text chosen for the occasion is Robert Frost’s “Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening.” At first mention, it seems an unlikely choice: What do these youngsters know about snow? But Bob’s teaching purpose is to help these students make meaning beyond the visualization experience of the text, also to, in effect, advance their reading interpretation skills.

The children are stimulated by the occasion—the visitor from New York City, the surround of teachers. Excited, nervous, they shift in their chairs, whispering to one another, stealing glances at their teacher. But when Bob starts reading the text aloud, they settle down. He passes out copies and then reads aloud a second time.

Initially, the responses, not unexpectedly, are to the snow. The students have seen pictures, but they wonder about it—what it would be like to walk and play in it, to watch it fall. When the murmur of these comments breaks, Bob, piggybacking on their comments of watching the snow fall, scans their faces and asks, “What do you do that’s like what the man in the poem is doing?” Smiling into the puzzled silence, he repeats the question, adding, “Think about all the things that you do.”

At first, the children’s responses are tentative, exploratory. They relate to the excursion: “Going for a drive in the country;” “taking a ride on a donkey cart.” These responses are edged forward by a couple of developmental questions: “What else is the man doing?” “What do you do that’s like that?” They know the answer to the first; the second is less immediate.

Hesitantly, Jenny asks, “Watch the rain?”

Bob nods encouragingly. “Does anyone else do that?” He pauses and acknowledges the signaling hands and voices. “Why do you watch the rain?”

“I watch to see if it’s going to stop so I can go out to play,” Phil says.

“Yeah, maybe there’s nothing else to do,” Martin interjects.

“Sometimes I’m waiting to go home. So, I watch ’til the rain slows down,” Christina says, “so I won’t get wet.”

“Sometimes I just like to watch it,” Matthew shrugs. “I don’t know why.”

“Anybody else who just likes to watch the rain?” Bob looks around. “Tomas?”

“Well,” Tomas glances toward Matthew, “I like to watch storms when the wind is fierce and everything’s blowing and the rain is splashing all over.”

“Yeah! The trees bend over.” “And the rain rattles on the roof.” “And the wind makes things fly.” Voices from around the room speak agreement.

“I watch storms like that, too,” Bob says. “Storms in New York can have fierce winds off the ocean that toss the rain at the buildings. But I like soft rains, too.”

A chorus of voices agrees. “Especially when the sun is shining at the same time,” says Nora. “Then, everything glistens and smiles.”

Bob smiles back at Nora. “Is there anything else that you do that’s like what the man in the poem is doing?” He waits.

After a long pause, Carla says, “Well, sometimes I sit on the beach and watch the waves.” She glances at Josie, who nods. “I don’t know why. I just do.”

“I do, too,” adds Josie. “Sometimes with Carla, sometimes by myself.”

“I like to watch the waves when the tide is coming in,” exclaims Martin. “They roar and crash against the shore.” He slaps one hand against the other, simulating the movement and sound of water against sand.

“In the morning the waves are quieter, like they’re sleepy. They’re nice to watch, too,” Phil says.

“They sparkle in the sun,” murmurs Carla.

Bob smiles at them. “I like the sound Martin makes—the roar and crash of the waves—and the look of sleepy waves. They remind me of some snow images in the poem.” He looks at his copy, the students turning to theirs. “Do you see them?”

“There’s downy flake,” says Beth, “That’s soft like sleepy.”

“And,” adds Joey, “easy wind”

“Oh, I like sweep of easy wind and downy flake,” exclaims Jenny. “It reminds me of how the sand flies when I’m sweeping the sidewalk.”

“Yes, those are soft snowy sounds.” Bob nods and waits.

“How about The woods are lovely, dark and deep?” asks Joey. “That’s kind of neat, the sound of it.”

“Mmm, it makes me shiver,” Carla says.

Bob nods again. He returns to the primary discussion. “Why do you watch them, the waves, I mean?”

“Like Carla says, they’re sparkly and pretty,” says Anne.

“Sometimes I count them,” Marcos grins at the class. “It’s crazy.”

“That would make me dizzy, watching and counting. If I watch too long, I get sleepy.” Tomas stares ahead. His head drooping, he pretends to drowse off.

The class laughs. “But it is relaxing,” Josie agrees. “Sometimes I forget I’m supposed to watch my little sister. I watch the waves and can’t seem to stop watching.”

“How many of you are like Josie and Tomas, you can’t stop watching and feel relaxed?” Hands go up, heads nod.

“Not when the tide is crashing and a storm is coming in.” Martin again simulates the waves, adding sound effects. Marcos and Phil join in, laughing.

Bob leads them back to the poem, asking them to compare their reasons for watching with those of the narrator, and to measure the hypnotic pull of the waves in comparison to that of the snowfall. His final question, “Why do you stop watching?” draws forth another connection for them as they relate their sense of obligations: to get home for supper, to complete a chore, because it has gotten late. The students conjecture the narrator’s tiredness, his need to complete his journey, and his promises to keep.

In traditional parlance, Berlin’s demonstration lesson can be identified as teaching a poem to this class. In a manner of speaking, he has. However, by helping the students explore their connectedness with this text, he has helped them to connect with the heart of the text, perhaps to evoke and experience a poem. Concomitantly, he has potentially advanced a reading skill—going beyond words to the making and interpreting of meaning. Helping students to consider the relationship of their experiences to text and to suggest routes of connection and of understanding is consequential in processing reading. These students may have seen the scenic and narrative text broadened and deepened; they may have gained a strategy to open the mystery of that meaning hidden somehow “between the lines.”

Further, Berlin has effectively led the students into the creation of a poem from the words. He has helped them envision beyond their initial responses to the scene and beyond their preliminary relatedness. Building bridges, he helped them fit their experiences into the words. The subsequent centering of attention gave impetus to both broader and individually specific responses. The student readers gained access to meaning.

RESPONSE-TO-LITERATURE BACKGROUND

Learning to read for most children starts with responses to stories, oral or read-aloud literature, or, in abbreviated form, responses to words. In the comforting ambience of parental attention and closeness, listening to words, often with the accompaniment of entrancing pictures, they develop language awareness and participate in language response. They experience the words, giggling, perhaps, at sound effects, repeating them for their own enjoyment; they experience wonder, their eyes wide, and experience joy at happy conclusions. They develop, too, subliminal awareness of story structure, being able, for example, to model and tell their own stories.

Such response-to-literature background is appropriately touted for its enhancement of reading readiness. Establishing positive, expectant attitudes about reading along with developing language and story awareness have significant learning effects. However, the responses themselves are equally significant; the giggles, the sighs, the exclamations reflect and enhance an increasing alertness to the effects of words, to the power that words in context have.

There are, of course, other language, nonliterary situations that promote experiences with words. Children are surrounded by symbols and texts—traffic signs, advertising symbols, billboards, food packages, and the like. Children, alive to situations, learn to “read” and understand these words situationally and experientially.

These early learning-to-read situations build word associations and broaden the children’s language landscape. These experiences are the underpinnings of reading.

These preliminary statements have focused on the language-reading responses of children to call attention to the reader and the role of the reader in the reading transaction. The foundation idea: The reading act necessarily involves a reader and a text. Without a reader, text does not come into existence—does not have meaning or invoke feelings or sensations, but is just squiggles on a page, whether it is an unnoticed stop sign, an unopened letter, or a skipped chapter in a book. (The word text refers to the marks on the page, the words as symbols. Text is differentiated from literary work or poem; these are used in reader-response literary criticism to refer to what emerges and evolves from the transaction of a reader and a text.)

These ideas were first promulgated in 1938 (and in subsequent 1968, 1983, and 1995 editions) by Rosenblatt in Literature as Exploration (1995, fifth edition) and expounded in The Reader, the Text, the Poem: The Transactional Theory of the Literary Work (1976). In recent decades, theories of literature, termed reader response criticism, have emerged from the acceptance of the important role of the reader during the reading act. However, not all reader-response approaches are identical in their expression of the reader’s role, some concentrating on the reader, others giving primary attention to the text. Rosenblatt’s transactional theory insists on the reader and the text, each affecting the other (as will be explained). It forms the core of this book.

Traditionally, the reader’s input in the reading act has been ignored; the text has been...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• DEDICATION
• Contents
• Preface
• Part I Transactional Theory and Literature-Based Teaching
• Part II Initiating and Developing Readers’ Responses: Classroom Case Studies
• Part III Exploring Issues: Content Area Applications
• Part IV Professional Development
• About the Authors
• Author Index
• Subject Index