Male and Female EFL Student Teachers’ Aesthetic Experiences of Reading and Responding to Literary Works

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.