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 explores how a reading group of pre-service teachers responded to the endings of three contemporary young adult texts and what such responses may imply about the interpretive preferences of teacher education. Set in the context of a Faculty of Education at a Canadian university, and using the lens of psychoanalytic theory, this…

Research acknowledges the value of youths reading books that represent their lives and cultures, yet there is a growing need to better understand how youths of understudied groups respond to multicultural stories. This single-case study of a multilingual refugee adolescent from Burma (Myanmar) investigates how she draws from her lived experiences…

This article presents the pedagogical implementation of the reader-response theory in a class of English as a foreign language with language pre-service teachers as they experience the reading of two short stories. The research took place over a 16 week period in which students kept a portfolio of their written responses to the stories.…