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C H A P T E R 2 :
Elements of Quality Children’s Literature

41
R
eader Response Theory 
by Gloria Houston
Louise Rosenblatt (1995) is arguably the best-known theorist of reader response , and 
she is certainly the most influential in the contemporary field of teaching children’s 
literature. Her transactional theory is grounded in the belief that meaning is not 
inherent in the text; rather, the reader/listener creates meaning in an active mental 
process when the reader and text converge. 
In this constructivist theory, a response to literature is a private inner reaction 
that is not observable by an outsider. The reader’s response begins during the act of 
reading and may continue well after the reading is finished, because reading is an 
active creative experience. 
Rosenblatt named two categories of reader response—efferent and aesthetic. An 
efferent (from the Latin efferre —to carry away) stance is appropriate when a reader’s 
attention is focused on information, facts, or instructions that will be retained after 
the reading. Therefore, it is the stance of choice for reading nonfiction, such as text-
books, reference books, informational books, and biographies. 
An aesthetic stance is the appropriate stance for reading fiction. It is more dif-
ficult to define because the most important goal of the aesthetic stance is to have a 
lived-through experience, which Rosenblatt calls an evocation . The aesthetic stance 
may be extended across an entire continuum of responses, including reliving the 
reading experience and imagining or picturing characters, settings, or events from the 
story. With aesthetic responses, the reader cognitively and emotionally interacts with 
the characters, the setting, and the images created by descriptions within the text to 
create an individual experience. In essence, the reader is living through the experience 
through the story or narrative—an evocation, or as one student defined it: a film in 
which the reader may play all the characters and be in the audience at the same time! 
The adoption of the appropriate stance for any text by inexperienced readers, 
especially for fiction, is not automatic. Teachers and parents should not assume 
that young readers would know which stance is appropriate when reading. Because 
everything else in the curriculum requires an efferent stance, readers often assume 
that stance is appropriate when reading fiction as well, even when they are not faced 
with end-of-chapter questions! Students have been taught the efferent stance so thor-
oughly (both by implication and through experience) that if we do not introduce the 
aesthetic stance and the concept of reading for pleasure, many readers will never be 
aware of it. In a way, we must unteach the efferent stance to unsophisticated readers 
if they are ever to understand the aesthetic stance. 
Rosenblatt suggests that, beyond the socially agreed-upon meanings of words 
(e.g., a cow is not an airplane ), there is no one right way to know what a text means.
Because responses are personal, a wide range of responses should be both accepted 
and encouraged. This theory, according to Rosenblatt, suggests that all interpreta-
tions of the meaning of a work are valid meanings. Meaning is not in text, and 
meaning is certainly not in teachers. Meaning is an interactive creation that occurs 
between the text and the reader’s mind . The meaning of any text will not be the same 
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