anxiety rather than of pleasure, and reinforce students’ feelings of their own inadequacy
as readers. The construction of textual meaning requires the correlation of details to
form patterns, the holding of unresolved questions in the head and the constant
generation and modification of expectations— all tough, vigorous mental activities which
are certainly not encouraged by the kinds of ‘comprehension’ exercises demanding
instant and ‘correct’ answers. Speculating and hypothesising, so essential to the
construction of meaning from literary text, as well as to the development of language
and thinking, are stifled by methods which penalise ‘error’. You don’t make guesses
when you are likely to be penalised for being wrong.
In order to become more active readers, students need help during the process of
reading. It is possible to develop in students the habit of asking questions while they are
reading, and to help them to realise that the answers they formulate at one reading
moment are provisional and will almost certainly require subsequent modification. The
Bathurst research shows that students can find it liberating to discover that in guessing
ahead you are likely to be wrong, and if you are, the text is far more interesting than if
you are right. Formulating and solving puzzles us a source of pleasure when the
rewards are so great, so long as the penalties are not imposed for perfectly productive
‘wrong’ answers. These are the kinds of questions that students can learn to ask of texts
and can find considerable enjoyment in so doing:
1 What is the significance of this particular detail, event, form of words?
2 How does it connect with other details, episodes?
3 What is this preparing us for? What kinds of things might happen?
4 How does this event affect my interpretation of what has gone before.
5 What am I learning about this character and his or her relationship with others?
Why was the character included in the story at all?
6 Whose point of view is being presented here? Why is this author offering this
character’s view at this stage?
7 What is the implied author’s view of this character, that particular behaviour, the
human condition as a whole? How is the author making me feel about this
character, that behaviour, the human condition? How is she or he doing this? Is my
world view changing when I match it with that offered by the text?ReferencesBooth, W. (1961) The Rhetoric of Fiction, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Byars, B. (1978/1981) The Cartoonist, Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Culler, J. (1975) Structuralist Poetics, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Harding, D.W. (1937/1972) ‘The role of the onlooker’ (Scrutiny 6, 3), in Cashdan, A. (ed.) Language
in Education: A Source Book, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul/Open University Press.
——(1962) ‘Psychological processes in the reading of fiction’, British Journal of Aesthetics 2:133–
147.
——(1967) ‘Considered experience: the invitation of the novel’, English in Education 2, 1: 7–15.
Iser, W. (1978) The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response, London: Routledge and Kegan
Paul.
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