This paper is submitted by Dr. Prashant Mishra, Professor and Head, Department of English Govt. S.V.P.G. College Neemuch (MP) 458 441.
ABSTRACT
Structuralism and modernism endeavour to explore the core and the central meaning of a text. They regard an author as God and elevated a text to the heights of canonical status. On the other hand, Postmodernism celebrates indeterminacy, open-endedness, marginality, individualism and polysemy. Deconstruction opened the door for the multiple signification of a text by regarding meaning as slippery. Reader-Response theory further contributed to Postmodern poetics and pedagogy by regarding interpretation of literature as something which is related to the experience and background of the individual readers. It believes that a text cannot mean the same to all the individual readers who have different backgrounds, tastes, traits, experiences and knowledge and therefore, interpretation of a text is bound to differ from one reader to another. Since the reader-response assigns central role to a reader, the approach will be more useful to students in Indian context who are taught literature as a means to facilitate them to acquire competence in the use of English. Reader-Response will change the passive learner into active one. By providing opportunities to the learners in the process of the interpretation of a text, it will also provide them opportunities to participate in a number of activities based on their personal experience, opinions, background knowledge, and interests and will ultimately lead the learners towards autonomous learning and sharpen their creative and critical faculties.
Key words: Reader-Response, Communicative competence, Schemata, indeterminacy
Introduction
Reader-Response criticism that earned recognition as a separate critical movement in 1970s frees teaching of literature from the narrow restrictions imposed by the traditional teaching methodology keeping the writer and the text in the centre. Earlier schools of criticism by keeping the writer and the text in the centre left no scope for learners to participate in the reading process. Structuralism and modernism endeavour to explore the core and the central meaning of a text. These approaches regarded author as God and elevated text to a canonical status. On the contrary, Postmodernism celebrates indeterminacy, open-endedness, marginality, individualism and polysemy by regarding meaning as slippery and contingent. Reader Response theory further contributed to postmodern poetics and pedagogy by regarding interpretation of a text as something which is related to the experience and background of the individual readers. It believes that a text cannot mean the same to all the individual readers whose backgrounds, tastes, traits, experience and knowledge differ and therefore, interpretation of a text is bound to differ from one reader to another. According to Stanley Fish(1980), “The place where sense is made or not made is the reader’s mind rather than the printed page or the space between the covers of a book”(Fish 1974:397). Wolfgang Iser believes that the author leaves the ‘gaps’ which the readers are expected to fill. He writes, “These gaps have a different effect on the virtual dimension, for they may be filled in different ways. For this reason, one text is potentially capable of several different realizations, and no reading can ever exhaust the full potential, for each individual reader will fill in the gaps in his own way, thereby excluding the various other possibilities, as he reads, he will make his own decision as to how the gap is to be filled”(Iser1989:79). Since the reader-response assigns central role to a reader, this approach will be more useful to students in Indian context who are taught literature as a means to facilitate them to acquire competence in the use of English. By providing opportunities to the learners to participate in the process of the interpretation of a text, it will ensure their participation in a number of class room activities based on their personal experiences, opinions, interests, creativity and knowledge and will ultimately lead the learners towards autonomous learning. The present paper attempts to explore the communicative potential of reader-response for EFL learners.
Reader Response and Its Relevance for CLT
One of the main aims of communicative language teaching is to aid the learner to participate in dialogues, debates, discussions, language activities and tasks in the class room to provide them sufficient exposure to acquire communicative competence. A judicious and planned use of reader-response can fruitfully use a text for communicative activities. Different genres of literature – prose, poetry, drama, fiction, speeches and epistles if skillfully used by a teacher to provide exposure in the four skills – reading, writing, listening and speaking will contribute to the communicative competence of the students. A few implications of reader-response for CLT are as follows:
- Initiates Individual responses form students.
- It is learner-centered and contributes to autonomous learning. Ensures the participation of the learners.
- Individualizes the learning of the students.
- Initiates discussions and debates in the class room.
- Rather than take refuge in ready made and stereotyped views of the critics, reader-response encourages students to express their view points. It allows the students to use their background knowledge to comprehend and extend the meaning of a text.
Provides Interpretative Freedom and Make Students Active Learners
One of the main aims of teaching literature to the EFL students is to make them competent in the use of language. A reader-response class room that permits students to participate in the reading process becomes vibrant with communicative activities. Students are provided interpretative freedom to make individual readings of a text. The class room no longer remains a dictatorial pulpit where stereotyped and frozen interpretations are prescribed and dictated to the students who remain mute spectators. Reader-response invites the responses from the individual students and makes them active responders who by providing fresh and individual interpretations expand the meaning of a text and fill the gap left by the writer. The text now becomes an open-ended entity and class room a democratic, dynamic, flexible and pluralistic platform where the meaning goes on expanding with every new response coming from a student. Students on getting chance to voice their views gain confidence as their experience, knowledge and imagination are relied on by the teacher in reading a text. This boost of confidence in EFL learners plays the most important role in learning English as a very large number of students give up their attempt to learn English due to inhibition, phobia and sometimes by prescriptive approach used by the school teachers who make the learners passive receptors and not active responders.
Individualizes Learning
Reader-Response by initiating the process of individual responses to a text individualizes the learning experience of the learners. By ensuring the participation of the learners in the interpretation of a text, it leads them on the path of autonomous learning. It exposes students to listening, reading, writing and speaking activities through the acts of reading a text aloud or through providing freedom to students to voice what they think about a text or asking them to pen down their reading experience of a text. Here the role of a teacher is that of a facilitator who supervises the responses of the students and helps them to use their prior knowledge and experience in the interpretation of a text. Sometimes students may come out with irrelevant interpretations which do not have any relation with a text. Here the teacher has to intervene to keep the responses within the context and theme of the text and to save them from irrelevant digressions. The aim of Reader-Response for EFL learners will be to create discussions and debates in the class room so that maximum communication takes place in a class room and teaching no longer remains a teacher-centered activity.
Triggers Creative and Critical Faculty of the Students
Application of Reader-Response in an EFL class room initiates individual response from the students. Different students who participate in the reading process come out with their own readings of a text. A teacher should ask the students to provide fresh and innovative interpretations of a text and not to repeat the views discussed in the class earlier. This exercise will sharpen the creative and critical faculty of the students which otherwise remains in inert state. Use of reader-response in an EFL class room has double advantage. The text students read provide them content and the theme to be discussed and debated in the class room. The opportunity to interpret a text and to discuss its content makes them think and express themselves in a foreign language. It makes them use a language responding to the familiar content imaginatively and creatively. The interaction that takes place in a class room when students argue in favour or against the topic also improves their logical and reasoning capacity and ultimately contributes to their communicative competence.
Encourages Critical and Creative Reading Habits among Students
Using reader-response as a pedagogical tool in the class room makes the students active learners. It encourages individual and subjective responses to a text. Instead of providing stereotyped responses and interpretations of text, reader-response endeavours to elicit individual responses form readers by triggering their background and experiential knowledge. By providing opportunities to students to participate in the discussion in the class room, it makes a text an open-ended entity which is open to multiple interpretations. Individual responses of the students will add new perspectives to the reading of a text. Earlier approaches, whether biographical or historical, looked at a text from only one perspective or yardstick and so completely banned the involvement of readers in the interpretation of a text. The interpretation of text was regarded as the sole responsibility of erudite scholars or critics. Consequently only a few interpretations of a text come out from learned critics and scholars. Reader-Response by making a text open to multiple responses and signification encourages critical and creative activities among students. Students may look into their own experience and background knowledge into a text. By using their own schemata to comprehend and interpret literature, students will become active learners. In this way, instead of regarding students only receptors of ready-made interpretations of a text, reader-response will initiate the process of critical and creative reading habits among the students.
Participation of the Learners in the Class Room Activities
To use reader-response effectively in an EFL class room for communicative purposes, a teacher should create some communicative activities based on the content of the text. However, he should be careful in the selection of the teaching material. The material which is conducive to the background knowledge and experience of the students and that can trigger imaginative responses from the students should be preferred. For example poems like “Night of the Scorpion” can be selected for teaching English to the rural students. As scorpion and snake bites are common in villages, most of the rural students have background knowledge about them and therefore can comfortably participate in the discussion in the class room. A few activities which can be conducted in a reader-response class-room and can be effectively used to improve the fluency of the students are listed below:
1. While teaching a text, a teacher may ask students to select few lines from a text and connect them to their own personal lives, experience, environment and occupations.
2. Students may be asked to read a text or a passage from it aloud and then asked to share their meaning with their class mates or work in pairs or small groups to arrive at a consensus meaning and then participate in a whole class discussion.
3. The teacher underlines some important words from a poem and then asks students to summarize the poem or provide its central idea using the underlined words.
4. While teaching a text, a teacher may select a parallel topic of contemporary relevance and interest of the students and initiate a debate or a discussion on it so that students will get chance to express their creative ideas.
5. While teaching a play, a teacher may select some interesting scenes from it and prepare students to perform them in the class room.
6. A teacher may ask students, turn by turn, to read various passages of a text aloud and then ask one of them to give their opinions on the main idea of the text.
7. A teacher may select a particular situation from a text and then ask the students to enact the roles given in the situation.
8. A teacher may select the role of a particular character while teaching drama, novel or a story and then ask the students to come out with their individual interpretation of the same type of character that they have come across in a movie or a play or a novel or a story.
9. While reading a text, we come across various themes, situations, roles etc. A teacher may ask his students to create some parallel imaginary themes, situations and roles based on the ones that they have read in the class room.
In this way, reader-response theory can be fruitfully used by a teacher to make EFL class room congenial for communicative activities. A teacher, while teaching prose, poetry, drama and other genres, can create such situations in the class room which initiate dialogues, discussions and conversational exchanges.
Reader-Response and the Choice of Text for EFL Learners
Advocates of reader-response (Bleich1975) suggest using the student’s background knowledge to encourage them to participate in the reading process and to instil confidence in them to come out with their individual interpretations. Here choice of texts also becomes important. The texts which relate to the socio-cultural setting and experiential and occupational background of the learners shall be preferred than the ones that are remote from the native environment and culture of the students. When the reading material is related to the lives, background and experience of the students, they will be full of joy and enthusiasm to participate in the learning process. The text and the background knowledge or experience of the participants will become complementary to each other. Reading of text will stimulate the students and activate their background and experiential knowledge to interpret it and respond to it in the class room. Reader-Response will be used fruitfully in the class room only when a text is comprehensible and students will be able to respond to it. Incomprehensible and texts alien to the experience of the students will discourage and repel them.
Limitations of the Reader-Response
Students may face problems in the reader-response class room as the application of the reader-response in the EFL class room is not without limitations. Firstly, EFL learners may face language problems as so many of them do not have linguistic competence needed for the understanding of a literary text. Therefore, it cannot be used effectively at the initial stages in EFL class room. Secondly, use of alien textual material and alien cultural context may also impede the comprehension of a text. Therefore learning material that is relative and congenial to the environment and experience of the students should be preferred so that their background knowledge and experience can be used in eliciting responses from the students. Thirdly, all the students do not possess required literary competence to respond to a literary text and as a result some of them may indulge in irrelevant responses. Here the role of a teacher becomes very important. Teacher may provide few hints to the students so that they produce relevant and right responses and abstain from irrelevancies and absurdities.
Conclusion
Teaching and learning through reader-response may have some limitations but its use in an EFL class optimizes the communication. As mentioned in the paper, reader-response can be fruitfully used in creating so many communicative situations in the class room that contribute to the communicative competence of the learners. Eliciting individual responses from the students, use of summation, performance of scenes, parallel discussion of texts, pair work or group work reading of a text, role play are some of the activities which a teacher can direct to activate fluency in his learners. These activities will involve the learners in expressing meaning and improve the comprehending and communicative faculties of the learners. Besides, reader-response triggers learners’ schemata in reading a text and leads them on the path of self-learning through their participation in various reader-response activities. To conclude, all the essentials of communicative language teaching can be synthesized with reader-response in an EFL class room.
References
Bleich, D.1975. Readings and Feelings: An Introduction to Subjective Criticism. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English.
Fish, Stanley.1974. Self –Consuming Artifacts. Berkley: University of California Press.
Hymes, Dell.1972. ‘On Communicative Competence’ in Pride, J.B. and J.Homes(Eds.). Sociolinguistics – Selected Readings. Harmondsworth:Penguin Books.
Isher, Wolfgang. 1989. “From ‘The Reading Process’: A Phenomenological Approach”. In Rice, Philip and Patricia Waugh(Eds.). Modern Literary Theory A Reader. London: Edward Arnold.
Nunan, D. 1989. Designing Tasks for the Communicative Classroom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
About the author
Dr. Prashant Mishra did his Masters in English and Ph.D. in criticism on “John Keats as a Critic: His Theory and Practice” from Vikram University Ujjain(M.P.). He also had his education at CIEFL Hyderabad from where he did Post Graduate Certificate in the Teaching of English, Post Graduate Diploma in the Teaching of English and M. Phil. in Linguistics and Phonetics. Presently, he is Professor and Head in the Department of English, Government P.G.College NEEMUCH(M.P.). He specializes in Linguistics, Criticism, Postmodern Theories and Pedagogical Issues. His publications include 40 research papers published in scholarly journals and anthologies. He also edited 5 anthologies of English Literature published by M.P. Hindi Granth Academy Bhopal(M.P.).He participated in 24 national seminars organized by different institutions and academic bodies in India and also acted as a resource person in some of them. He has also delivered talks on Linguistics, Stylistics, Grammar, Human Rights in various colleges of M.P. and Rajasthan. He is on the editorial board of ‘Reflection’ a prestigious journal published from Bhagalpur (Bihar) and also an executive member of Rajasthan Association of English Studies.He is also associated with ‘Journal of Teaching and Research in English Literature’ as an Editor.