Young Readers Responding to Poems

First published in 1988, Young Readers Responding to Poems adopts a teacher-researcher approach to the processes of responding to poems. It shows experienced teachers exploring how their students, aged fourteen and above, read and respond to poetry, sets their innovative practices against the background of traditional theory in poetry teaching, and theorises these practices so as to generate new concepts to help teachers understand how readers and poems interact. Governed by the feeling that literature must be ‘rescued’ from the teacher’s explanation and given back to readers, the book will be of great practical value to teachers of English. It suggests classroom practices that will motivate children to read poetry with enthusiasm based on the knowledge that their individual responses are not only valid but valued as the main subject-matter of poetry lessons.

Beginning with a critical appraisal of the main theorists in the field from I.A. Richards to Louise Rosenblatt, Michael Benton outlines the main conceptual and methodological problems in exploring responses to poetry. The work of three teacher-researchers – John Teasey, Ray Bell and Keith Hurst – is recorded. It maps in detail pupils' evocations of poems, monitors their responses as individuals and in groups, and offers ways of conceptualising the idiosyncratic character of reading, the stages of response, and the nature of group talk about poetry. In a final chapter, Michael Benton draws together what can be concluded from these three enquiries about the elements of response to poetry and offers a response-centred methodology.