Faculty of Education - Theses
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ItemExploring an appropriation of reader-response theory for teaching and learning English literature in Vietnam( 2016)While learner-centred approaches to literature in second/foreign language education have enjoyed wide empirical support, the teaching of English literature in Vietnam still focuses on transmitting an objectified interpretation of a text. This study explores the potential of appropriating reader-response theory (Rosenblatt, 1994), which locates the meaning of a literary text through the reader-text connection, with the following question: In what ways can reader-response theory make a contribution to the teaching and learning of English literature at the undergraduate level in Vietnam? This research was conducted through the implementation of an innovative teaching intervention based on reader-response theory. The teaching intervention appropriated reader-response theory to nurture students’ own experiences of and responses to English literature through interactive activities. This intervention was designed to work within an institutional syllabus at a university in Vietnam. The study used action research, in which the researcher participated as the teacher implementing the teaching intervention. Action research complements reader-response theory as both attend to interactive meaning making in context. Data were collected from 48 English-major students through pre-course and post-course questionnaires, class recordings, a teaching journal, after-class evaluations, online communications and reading logs. The data were analysed using three perspectives: those of the teacher and student participants, and a real-time view of class conversations and artefacts. This research found that appropriating reader-response theory in this context involved creating a transition from teacher-centred to student-centred learning, where dialogic teaching and interactive activities were used to evoke students’ own responses to the text. This transition required the teacher to adopt a dynamic role taking students’ learning styles into account. Through this approach, the students became dialogic and critical in developing their own responses to the texts they studied. However, they showed some contradictory attitudes to the unconventionality of the reader-response approach, which asked for and helped develop the students’ own responses to literature rather than giving them final answers. The mixed reaction indicated the complexity of creating a new learning paradigm in a traditional context. The students seemed to negotiate this complexity and become more critical about their own learning as a result. An important implication of this study is that it illustrates the potential of reader-response theory to contribute to teaching programs that seek to enable learners to experience literature in a second/foreign language individually and interactively. Based on the research findings, a model for appropriating reader-response theory is proposed that coalesces and balances active individual reading, collaborative exploration of responses, and language and literary scaffolding. In authority-abiding, exam-oriented institutional contexts such as in Vietnam, appropriating reader-response theory also requires mindfulness of a potential tension between the old and new practice, especially with regard to assessment issues.