Your most difficult challenge may be to instill in your students a sense of their own reading power and autonomy. Many discouraged readers feel that reading is nothing more than a search for the “correct” meaning or being able to answer the questions at the end of the story. The text is in control, the student is the passive recipient, and it is her job to try to figure out someone else’s meaning.
In Literature as Exploration , Louise Rosenblatt describes reading as a “transaction,” maintaining that young readers must feel free to deal with their own reactions to what they are reading in order to find meaning in the text. Each young person brings to his or her reading “personality traits, memories of past events, present needs and preoccupations, a particular mood of the moment, and a particular physical condition.”
How can students become active players in their reading “transaction”? You might ask her what she sees, feels, thinks, or remembers as she reads. Encourage her to relate her reading to her own experience, or to that of others she knows. Sharing your own reactions and experience can sometimes establish a lively conversation. Other mediums, such as a drawing or music, allow students creative opportunities to express personal connections between life and literature.
