Readers assume that commonplace properties of the real world also hold in realistic fiction. They believe, for example, that the usual physical laws continue to apply. But controversy exists in theories of fiction about whether real "individuals" exist in the story's world. Does Queen Victoria exist in the world of "Jane Eyre,"…

The paper deals with the work of the Czech children's author Jaroslav Foglar from a gender perspective, reflecting on two themes in particular: the absence of heroines; and his understanding of boys' reciprocity and friendship with the adoration of physicality. The impetus for this analysis was data from a questionnaire survey, the aim of which…

Readers are increasingly exposed to text that includes both words and images through comics, graphic novels, online materials, and video games. In this study, we use the medium of the 4-panel comic strip to examine how readers make meaning of the word/image composite. We propose a cognitive interactive framework that incorporates both the…

The paper presents findings from a reader response study conducted in February 2013 with 150 children aged 7-11 in which they discussed extracts and clips from Roald Dahl's "Matilda" (1988) and its cinematic adaptation (1996). Dahl and "Matilda" were chosen because they provoke emphatic responses from adults, often commenting…

The connection between evaluation practice and its ultimate goal--social betterment--is indirect. With little or no direct control over social programs and policies, many evaluators rely on the actions of stakeholders to bridge the gap between evaluation practice and its purpose. Consequently, communicating with influence becomes key. The present…

Reader expectations form across hierarchical scales of discourse (e.g., from coarse to fine: genre, narrative, syntax). Cross-scale interactivity produces word reading times (RTs) with multifractal structure. After introducing multifractals, we test two hypotheses regarding their relevance to reader expectations: (1) multifractal evidence of…

This qualitative case study explores the nature of reading engagement, taking a reader response approach to analysing and discussing the experiences and perspectives of real readers. The paper reports a collaborative research project in which a group of five primary-age children and a group of five adults of different ages were asked to read and…

This article reports on two studies investigating reader stance, navigation, and response in expository hypertext. Subjects in the studies included 69 and 147 adult readers prompted to adopt either an efferent or aesthetic stance when reading a 36-node expository hypertext. Reading was followed by recall and essay writing tasks. Results of the…

Spearman's "Law of Diminishing Returns" states that the g saturation of a test is greater for individuals with lower, rather than higher, test scores, and that it decreases with age. A common methodological problem in testing Spearman's "Law of Diminishing Returns" with respect to ability differentiation is how to create the…

Drawing on interviews and on the actual language that readers (students, teachers, and adults) use to interpret and respond to literary texts, this book examines the conventions that shape talk about literature in large groups, small groups, and adult book clubs. By looking across contexts, the four separate but related studies in the book raise…

Describes a study at the Willings Learning Clinic that analyzed the responses of 39 male students, 66 female students, 44 adult males, and 51 adult females to literature. Five styles of responding to literature are discussed: the analyzer, the picture maker, the reflector, the elaborator, and the internalizer. (CR)

Concludes that reader enjoyment is related to both syntactic and semantic unpredictability. (FL)

Based on theories of emotional intelligence, adult education, psychology of reading, and emotions and literature, this study was designed to develop and validate the Affective Response to Literature Survey (ARLS), a psychological instrument used to measure an emotional response to literature. Initially, 27 items were generated by a review of…

Reviews several theoretical perspectives and presents data pertinent to what makes a story likable. Examines the contribution of two story characteristics to adults' and elementary students' ratings of story liking and storyhood: the importance of the goal the protagonist pursues and the difficulty of attaining that goal. (JAD)

A study examined how the third version of a questionnaire on readers' backgrounds (developed for the "Folktale project", which explores similarities and dissimilarities in the response to literature from and in different cultures) fared internationally under field conditions which would not immediately be controlled by members of the…