ABSTRACT
Research into the reading responses of elementary and secondary students burgeoned in the 1970s, as more formalistic criticism lost favor, and Rosenblatt’s (1978) transactional theory of reader response readily meshed with a cognitivebased revisioning of reading comprehension (Marshall, 2000; Pearson,1985). Rapidly, literacy researchers began to ask questions about how and under what circumstances readers constructed their interpretations of text. As the 21st century opened, Galda and Beach (2001) posited that the complex nature of response and new theoretical perspectives had contributed to even more “sophisticated questions about texts, readers, and contexts for response” (p. 64).
