ABSTRACT
This chapter describes activities for engaging students in “relational responding” based on their languaging actions with narrators/characters as well as peers in responding to literary texts. This includes reflectional framing of events in texts constituted by certain norms shaping narrators’/characters’ languaging. It also includes inferring the “eventness” (Bakhtin, 1984) or significance of certain actions associated with the potential consequences of those actions on characters’ relations with other characters. To help students understand the notion of “eventness” events, students can share their own narratives associated with dramatizing the event to enhance the “tellability” of an event. Students are also responding to how characters’ emotions or embodied actions serve to enact certain relations with other characters, as well as how they draw on their own experiences of languaging relations with others to interpret characters’ relations. Students also apply critical perspectives to how that languaging is shaped by race, class, and/or gender difference to critique characters’ use of languaging, as well as through rewriting events portraying characters’ languaging actions based on their own attitudes about those actions.
