ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses a fact that too often gets overlooked in classroom teaching: namely, readers have both an internal, imaginative involvement with the fictional content of a story and an external awareness that the content is ordered and controlled by a writer–that it is ‘only a story’. For young readers especially, success with the opening of a story is crucial. Practised readers develop a tolerance, a willingness to wait and trust the writer to engage their interest, where the less experienced may become impatient. ‘Aesthetic reading’ is Rosenblatt’s phrase to distinguish the stance readers adopt when engaging with literary texts; ‘efferent reading’ is her corresponding description of the stance readers take towards informational texts. The concept of a ‘role-playing reader’ incorporates two fundamental ideas: the notion of taking on a persona for the duration of a reading, and the view of the activity as ‘participating in a game of make-believe’.
