Abstract:
The present study investigates the effects of reader-response-based literature instruction on male
and female EFL student teachers’ aesthetic experiences in reading and giving responses to
literary works assigned. The study is underpinned by Rosenblatt’s (2005) reader response theory
by which transactional process between readers and text evoke personal reflections such as
feelings and critical thoughts individually represented in enjoying and engaging the text. The
negotiated response-based classroom practices to foster readers’ needs, wants, and interests,
included group and classroom discussions, peer-feedbacks, and writing journals. Two intact
groups of the third grade of EFL teacher training of a private college in Ciamis, West Java,
Indonesia, participated in the study, all of whom took literary criticism subject, and were
assigned to critically enjoy fictions. The first intact group (N= 21) included 5 male and 16
female students and the second one (N= 18) comprised 5 male and 13 female, respectively. A
case study through program evaluation (Cohen et al., 2007) was aimed at uncovering how male
and female pre-service teacher trainees reflected their process of aesthetically reading and
responding to the text assigned. The data collection included classroom observation,
documenting written journals, and administering questionnaires. The patterned ‘themes’ of
reading process and response strategies as reflected in the illuminating data, support the
findings. The findings suggest that female subjects of the two groups used more expressive
strategies than male did. The study recommends that further studies focus on typical expressions
in response strategies of both male and female.
