Disputes the contentions mabe by Bruno Bettelheim concerning the state of reading and reading instruction in the United States. (FL)

Few children possess the knowledge and experience to identify the best books from the numbers that flood the market, so it is wise for authors, publishers, librarians, teachers, and parents to be aware of any body of informed critical opinion regarding excellence in books for children. The contribution of the conscientious critic is as valuable to…

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)

By classifying questions asked into categories of form, content, and affect, this analysis interprets Alan Purves' 1979 reanalysis of student responses to literature in a 1973 study. Notes that students emphasized form when viewing literature in the abstract, but that they looked at individual stories in terms of content and affect. (MKM)

The usages of transaction and interaction are differentiated as reflections of differing paradigms, the transactional theory of reading is disassociated from information processing and interactive processing, and the implications for research of various concepts basic to the total transactional theory of reading are discussed. (HOD)

If the classroom English teacher is to be given any assistance in determining the most appropriate literary experiences for developing students' literature appreciation, it is imperative that research create a clearer understanding of the factors involved in developing discrimination in literature. (RL)

Presents summaries of empirical studies of kindergartners, fifth graders, high school students, and college students, which suggest that people use stereotypes and gender-based identification in encoding, retrieving, and making inferences. Discusses results of qualitative research on differences in male and female responses to literary texts.…

Reading comprehension involves making connections between prior knowledge and the visual information on the page. To reduce uncertainty, the reader makes orthographic, syntactic, or semantic predictions. Thus, comprehension is relative, dependent on the answers to different readers' different kinds of questions. The reader does not record a…

To put the interdisciplinary Turko-Danish Fairytale Project, which is concerned with the dynamics of reader response to literature, into a theoretical framework, this paper first describes how modern aesthetics take an interdisciplinary approach and investigate--by cross cultural approaches and in human behavior terms--the phenomenon of art and…