Evocation and Reflection in the Reading Transaction: A Comparison of Proficient and Less Proficient Readers

Abstract

This study sought to identify differences between proficient and less proficient readers in their use of personal evocations and reflections in the reading transaction. Informants were six college freshmen who wrote open-ended responses to each of four short stories. Readers in this study typically engaged in a process of evoking or reflecting upon personal and textual experience. In their evocative or reader bound responses, proficient readers seemed to summon emotional and personal experience as an invitation into the world of the text, whereas less proficient readers appeared to use their evocations of experience to withdraw from the text. Informants' reader-focused reflections focused on characters and on the story as a whole. Although proficient readers integrated textual cues and prior knowledge in a process of reflecting about stories and characters, less proficient readers seemed to approach the texts in a rather linear way, often neglecting to synthesize personal and textual experience in their reflections. These findings demonstrate that teachers and researchers must move beyond general categories of response to explore how readers evoke and reflect upon personal and textual experience in response to literary texts.