Reader+Response

=Reader Response =

﻿"Readers are actively involved in the construction of meaning" (Bainbridge and Pantaleo, 2001, p. 402)

Reader response is a transactional process, offering a personal relationship between the reader / viewer and the text. It is an ongoing, constantly evolving process that grows with each interaction with the text (Rosenblatt, 1995). Critics point to the personal response and see this is superficial, but done correctly, reader response allows the student to dig deep into the text, developing meaning and deeper understanding through the interaction. This is explored in the Johnson Connor's discussion of using //The Middle Passage: White Ships/Black Cargo// with a secondary English class (Johnson Connor, 2003, p. 241). She discusses the **stances** which are part of reader response.


 * Efferent stance - reading for information, characterised as impersonal and nonliterary
 * Aesthetic stance - notably more literary, allowing the reader to center their own transactions with the book and the imahes, feelings, sensations, moods, and ideas which build with the reader's response and cultural capital / knowledge brought to the text.

﻿Rosenblatt argues that the reader and the text build the literary work "in the live circuit set up between reader and text" (Rosenblatt, 1976, p. 25). Reception theory, expoundered by Iser, sees the reading experience as "guided by the text and the personal experiences and cultural history of the reader" (Bainbridge and Pantaleo, 2001, p.402). Omissions, gaps and indeterminancies are what entice the reader into making the constructions of the text.

Picture books are fertile ground for the transactional process, and for readers to draw on the constructions of the text. The creation of meaning in a text such as Gary Crew's //First Light// where the images play with suggestions of subversive meanings, or draw in referent iconography in an intertextual fashion, such as the B-Grade movie genre referenced in //TheWatertower// are sound examples of the way in which a picture book can be explored by students to develop understandings and responses to the text//.//