The purpose of this essay is to investigate how Shared Reading facilitators consider the method to function as a reader development strategy. What purpose does Shared Reading serve for the participants according to the facilitators? Does Shared Reading affect the participants’ interest in literature? What social functions does Shared Reading serve for the participants? How does the facilitator regard his/her own role in reader development? To answer these questions six facilitators have been interviewed, four of them with leading roles in projects with a purpose of spreading Shared Reading as a reader development strategy in Sweden. The results are analyzed using Louise M. Rosenblatt’s reception theory. The results show that Shared Reading influences the participants’ reading habits, that Shared Reading can have an important social function for individuals living in social exclusion and that there is an interest in working with the method from several organizations in Sweden.

This is a study of the reactions of high school students in Sweden when reading A Modest proposal (Swift, 1729). If they get the chance to write whatever they want about the text, what do they find important? This study emanates from Rosenblatts (2002) view of reading out of two different stances: the aesthetical and the efferent. The aesthetical mode is reading for pleasure and experiencing the text, whilst in efferent reading the reader is primarily focused on what he or she will carry away as information from the text (Rosenblatt). To be able to categorize the material from the students more properly, a different set of ideas about reading modes, obtained from Tengberg (2011), is also presented and used in this essay.

This qualitative, action research study was guided by two primary research questions. First, how do students negotiate aesthetic, efferent, and critical stances when reading a novel set in Afghanistan? Second, how do aesthetic and efferent stances contribute to or hinder the adoption of a critical stance? A large body of research exists that examines student responses to literature, and much of that research is based on the transactional theory of reading. However, it remains unclear how critical literacy fits into this theory. This study describes how one group of high school students’ aesthetic and efferent responses to a novel set in Afghanistan supported their development of critical stances. Six students enrolled in a ninth-grade English course participated in this study. Data were collected for 13 weeks. Data included two individual interviews with each student, student writing assignments in the form of 6 assigned journal entries and 7 assigned essays, transcriptions of 12 class discussions, field notes, lesson plans, a teacher researcher journal, and research memos. Data were analyzed using the constant comparative method. Three major findings emerged from this study. First, class discussions provided a context for students to adopt stances that were not evident in their individual written responses to the novel, which were completed prior to the discussions. Second, the discussions provided scaffolding that helped several of the students adopt world-efferent and critical stances. Third, both the aesthetic and the efferent stances contributed to students’ adoption of critical stances.

No description available.

This dissertation will trace the emerging paradigm of transaction as a model for the dynamics of the reading process. The paradigm of transaction, implicit in John Dewey's writings as early as 1896 in "The Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology," was originally described in terms of "interaction" between organism and environment. Only in 1949, in the twilight of his career, did Dewey definitively distinguish between "transaction" and "interaction," ascribing a mutually transformative character to the former process. In Knowing and the Known, Dewey and co-author Arthur F. Bentley (1949) proposed adoption of a wholly new "transactional vocabulary" as a precision tool for a new mode of scientific inquiry, whereby inquiry itself was recognized as a species of transaction between inquirer and observed phenomena. Even before the publication of Knowing and the Known, literary theorist Louise M. Rosenblatt had applied an implicitly transactional model of the relationship between organism and environment to the relationship between reader and text. She described this dynamic model of the reading process in Literature as Exploration (first published in 1938), a work that has inspired an ongoing revolution in the teaching of reading and literature at all instructional levels. In the first edition of this work, Rosenblatt employed Dewey's original term--"interaction"--to describe the dynamic relationship between reader and text. Following the publication of Knowing and the Known in 1949, Rosenblatt began systematically to appropriate Dewey and Bentley's transactional terminology in her analysis of the reader-text relationship. Educators who share the transactional vision of Dewey and Rosenblatt tend to see the role of the teacher as that of a facilitator of reader-text transaction and of reader-reader transaction as arbitrated by the text, rather than as an imparter of authoritative interpretations of texts. Envisioning potentialities for students' growth through such transactions gives rise neither to sanguine optimism nor to despair, but rather to a hopeful meliorism. / Ph. D.

Syftet med arbetet var att undersöka hur det i kursen Svenska 1 på gymnasiet går att arbeta med två skönlitterära verk, Hannahs hemlighet och Undret, för att skapa medvetenhet om diskriminering utifrån temat funktionsvariation. Studien ämnar ge förslag till hur det går att arbeta med frågor kring funktionalitet i svenskundervisningen samt till att styrka användningen av skönlitteratur vid arbete med värdegrundsfrågor. De frågor undersökningen förankras i är följande: På vilket sätt skildras funktionsvariation kopplat till diskriminering i den valda litteraturen? På vilket sätt kan de litterära verken erbjuda identifikationsmöjligheter för unga läsare med funktionsvariation? Hur kan de skildringar som återfinns i verken vara relevant för dagens gymnasieelever och samtidigt bidra till skolans värdegrundsarbete? De teorier som valdes för arbetet är crip theory och den transaktionella teorin. Hermeneutik och narrativanalys valdes som metoder för att analysera materialet. Resultatet visade att funktionsvariation skildras genom betoning och kritik av normer i samhället.

Studiens syfte är att undersöka nya vägar till att främja kritiskt tänkande i ämnet svenska på gymnasiet, där den erfarenhetspedagogiska undervisningstraditionen är den rådande ämneskonceptionen. Genom en återgång till och närläsning av Vygotskijs ”Undersökningens problem och metod” i Tänkande och språk samt Rosenblatts Literature as Exploration ämnar studien ge svar på om verken ger nya impulser till ett tänkande om kritiskt tänkande och om ett ”tänkesätt” kan ersätta en entydig definition av begreppet för läraren i svenskämnets litteraturundervisning på gymnasiet. Studien visar att Vygotskijs ”enhetens metod” är användbar för att dels förstå hur förståelsen av kritiskt tänkande kan utvidgas, dels hur litteraturundervisningen lämpar sig för främjandet av kritiskt tänkande. Studien visar också att det är rimligt att läraren utvecklar ett didaktiskt tänkesätt i stället för att utgå ifrån en entydig definition av kritiskt tänkande som är svår, om inte omöjlig att enas om. En återgång till och närläsning av teoretiska nyckeltexter som gjorts i denna studie kan vara en väg att skaffa sig ett sådant tänkesätt.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the literature didactic approach in two learning materials for the upper secondary school. The empirical material includes two books: Svenska impulser 3 and Svenska 3 helt enkelt. Theories about teaching literature, and systematic text condensation are used for the analysis. In the learning materials literature is emphasized and plays an important role.The results indicate that the main function of literature didactics is to teach students to analyze literature, but also to create a curiosity and interest in literature, to develop students' knowledge of literature and to present a variety of literary works. Furthermore, students are expected to adopt an objective perspective while working with the chapters of literature. This result is indicating that teachers who use these learning materials also need to add more aesthetic reading into the literature lessons. The books also mediate that literary understanding largely is a social process.

No description available.

This study explores aspects of the theoretical basis of Louise M. Rosenblatt's transactional theory of reading and its focus on the reader's efferent and aesthetic stances during transaction with nonfiction and fiction. The study explores the following questions: Does genre (nonfiction or fiction) influence the reader's response to a literarytext? Does a reader's process of reading change during a nonfictional reading compared to a fictional one? Are there certain factors that persuade a reader to view a nonfictional piece of writing differently than a fictional one? To examine these questions and to ensure the validity of the study, I wrote a story titled "The Exit" and presented the writing to three freshman English classes, first as nonfiction and then during the next class period as fiction. I chose to follow Rosenblatt's class procedure: an initial reading with free responses, an interchange of ideas, and then a rereading of the same text. For research purposes I needed bulk written and verbal responses to compare and contrast. This three-day immersion in nonfiction and fiction reflections produced sufficient data to analyze: (1) written free responses from the initial reading of the text as nonfiction; (2) recorded audio tapes of their small groups, responding to five inquiry questions regarding the nonfiction text; (3) written individual take-home responses to the same five inquiry questions; (4) written free responses from the second reading of the text as fiction; (5) recorded audio tapes of the small group discussions on their nonfiction and fiction responses; and (6) recorded audio tapes of the entire class reflections on the responses to reading the story as both nonfiction and fiction. During this expedition I kept a journal of each day's events so that as my students and I experienced this exploration together, I could capture what we all were feeling and thinking as it was actually happening. Although the students were unaware of genre influence until the third-day class reflection, there were distinct differences in student responses to nonfiction and fiction. These students predominately read nonfiction aesthetically and fiction efferently. In this study with these students, genre did influence the reader's response; the reader's process of reading did change during the nonfictional reading compared to a fictional one; and there were certain factors which persuaded the reader to view the nonfictional piece of writing differently than the fictional one. The contrast and comparison of the students' responses to nonfiction and fiction are shown in a detailed Venn diagram. In addition, I have included an extensive essay titled "The Transactional Dance: Louise Rosenblatt's Presence in the History of Literary Criticism." Her transactional theory of reading transcends time and continues to invite research. / Ed. D.