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,"…

This article presents a small case study of two childhood readers of Enid Blyton's Famous Five series, who meet in a research project devoted to a different but related topic. One is Indian by birth and background, the other, Canadian. Their experience of this series is separated by distance (many thousands of miles), time of reading (nearly fifty…

Fiction, more than expository text, nurtures intimate connections between text and the reader's life experiences. This dimension of reader response is underexplored in relation to children. Adapting methods from Empirical Literary Studies to educational research objectives, the authors employed the concept of 'remindings', i.e. reminiscing…

In the digital age, children's and adolescents' willingness to engage in absorbed reading for pleasure is on the decline. Digital narratives with a linear storyline enriched with hyperlinks to supporting media materials, could potentially facilitate narrative absorption even better than print, thus stimulating fictional reading among adolescents.…

When schools present texts through their explicit curricula, they infuse those stories with a certain perceived value (Eisner, 2002). When those accounts all ring with the same voice, they promote the merit of those people represented over those excluded (Haslem, 1998). In this study, we explored how White high school students responded to…

This study examines the reader-response journals of an English learner (EL) who read two works of historical fiction in his English Language Development class at a public high school in California. Locating this study within the tradition of research on reader response, it investigates how the EL constructs his own individualized meaning by…

Resisting the will to empathise with a focalised character is assumed to be difficult for young readers, yet empirical evidence on how they actually respond is limited. This paper combines recent insights gleaned from cognitive literary studies with a small-scale empirical study of thirty-five Swedish adolescents reading an Irish short story in…

This article combines interview data from a group of boys of color at an urban single-sex school and content analysis of "The Autobiography of Malcolm X" and "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone" to demonstrate the complexities of readers' responses to literature. Textual relevance, or the ability to construct personal…

Private student discourses are often ignored or prohibited in the academy; however, these private discourses are very meaningful, and representative of the ways that students order and speak about the world. Specifically, religion is an extremely significant private student discourse; exploring religious discourse might help students not only to…

Describes a study in which 24 subjects received 1 of 4 prose excerpts, each labeled as fiction or nonfiction and manipulated to refer to a familiar or unfamiliar social group. Concludes that the impact on readers' beliefs of fiction messages about unfamiliar peoples may equal or exceed that of nonfiction messages. (SG)

This study examines how teachers' use of affective strategies (voice intonation, dramatization, personal involvement comments) during the reading and discussion of books influence young children's affective reactions (dramatization, personal engagement, language play comments). Twenty kindergarten teachers read four books, two fiction and two…

A study investigated the religious and spiritual values in selected children's books. A second study investigated children's comprehension of the values messages. Thirty realistic fiction books which won, or were honor books for, the John Newbery Medals for 1974-1988 were selected. A modified version of the Values Category Scale was developed and…

A study was conducted to explore student response to literature and the influence of classroom experiences on that response. Three novels were selected for study: "The Catcher in the Rye" by J. D. Salinger, "The Grapes of Wrath" by John Steinbeck, and "A Farewell to Arms" by Ernest Hemingway. Each of 54 freshman English students read one of the…

Uses stimulated recall to elicit a retrospective account from a student following his production of an artistic text representing his view of the relationship of two central characters in a short story. Analyzes the student's process of composition. Suggests that nonlinguistic texts can help students construct meanings. (HB)

Over a 2-year period, several teacher book clubs were studied. Teachers' and preservice teachers' responses to a series of texts that focused on multiculturalism in American society were examined. Twelve elementary school teachers, representing four ethnic groups (European American, Asian American, African American, and Hispanic), volunteered to…