Reading Responses

We've recently started focusing on reading responses in all of my classes. A question I am frequently asked is, "Mr. Leckrone, why do we have to do this? How does this help us?" This is often connected to the belief that the book (or the method) has no relationship to the student's actual life and, therefor, cannot possibly teach the student anything.

The purpose of reading responses is to get students into the habit of thinking about anything and everything they read. Some students, of course, do this already; many students, however, do not.

According to Wolfgang Iser, "The significance of the work...does not lie in the meaning sealed within the text, but in the fact that the meaning brings out what had been previously sealed within us....Through gestalt-forming, we actually participate in the text, and this means that we are caught up in the very thing we are producing. This is why we often have the impression, as we read, that we are living another life." (Iser, The Act of Reading, pp. 157, 132)

In other words, while texts may have meaning in and of themselves, the more profound meaning is the one that is created when the reader actively considers what the text could possibly mean in relation to his or her own knowledge, life and context.

A great deal of information is available on this subject, from wikipedia pages to individual school and teacher web sites. I found several sites particularly useful when investigating this technique:

http://www.vcu.edu/engweb/home/theory.html
http://www.centralischool.ca/~bestpractice/response/index.html
http://www.teachersnetwork.org/ntol/howto/adjust/improvereading.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reader-response_criticism

The methods I am currently using for reading responses are very simple- low-tech, if you will. Students read from their text and, as they read, they write down sections of the text that they have questions about or that they find interesting. Ideally, students could use sticky notes to mark the place in their text, thus limiting the interruption of their reading processes. After marking the places, they go back and write a single sentence about each section they've marked. Responses should demonstrate a variety of different kinds of thinking- musing, prediction, analysis, comparison.