ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the centrality of the reader in the interpretative process and highlights the importance of teachers thinking about the kinds of knowledge and other resources that readers both bring to and need to access in the literature classroom. It provides an overview of reader-response theories with a focus on Louise Rosenblatt’s transactional theory. Like Rosenblatt’s transactional theory, Text World Theory asserts that all of these mental representations are negotiated between the author, and reader. In Text World Theory terms, such talk would usually include participants triggering shifts in world-structure through their use of negation, hypotheticals and modality which in turn place demands on other group participants in terms of how they track and respond. A final use of Text World Theory, is to support the analysis of classroom discourse to allow the teacher to explore the nature of interaction that students have as they discuss literary texts, which in turn can lead to decisions about learning state.
