Response-Based Approach to Reading Literature

Judith A. Langer’s “A Response-Based Approach to Reading Literature” talks about The Center’s mission on how to improve the teaching and learning of literature. The reader-based theory is designed to take the literature that students are reading and give them room to use their own experiences and culture backgrounds to design their own interpretations. What I personally like about this approach is that they understand that there are multiple perspectives and not just one. Looking back on my high school days I only remember there ever being one right answer when it came to interpretations. The Center also relives it takes a couple of reads to fully understand a text and come up with deeper interpretations. The more students experience the more they will interpret. Also with more experience their point of view on an interpretation will change. 

As I was reading this article I came across a topic that I thoroughly enjoy as history minor. With literature students get to live through the history. It is one thing to give students a history background, but by giving them literature they are able to live through history with the characters. They get to read and experience the emotions of those characters. 

Another aspect of this article that I enjoyed from a teacher’s perspective is this idea of having multiple perspectives. This allows students to think openly and conclude their own understandings and perspectives and build upon that without having a teacher tell them their wrong only because they don’t have that in their lesson plans. Teachers need to be more flexible in their lesson plans and allow their students creativity to flow like water. As teachers we need to use our class time effectively, but we also have to allow class time to explore these possibilities instead of reading at home and recounting the information they remember. As a new teacher I tend to give give the information instead of allowing students to think and interpret their own thoughts. Langer tells us that we shouldn’t do that. We need to encourage their own interpretations with mature literary discussions. Discussion is a big part of the response-based approach and with that we must also keep in account how to successfully use discussion within the classroom.