Wilhelm, Chapter 3 - The Dimensions of Reader Response

This chapter is a great primer for the teacher as researcher. Wilhelm uses it as a sort of methodology chapter that leads into his discussion of his findings. As teacher researchers we can use this study as a basis of our own studies.

Teacher Journal – I have used and still use this method, although never as consistently as I should. Writing once a week is better than once a month; writing once a day is better than once a week; writing after every class period is the best we have time for; writing on the fly as something strikes us is the best of all. Journals are great to go back to if you are writing an article about your practices. If you have the time, journals also allow you to change your teaching practices as you go along.

Literary Letters – This practice can be useful if done properly. Students hate nothing more than activities that are a waste of time. Students need to understand upfront the relevance of writing letters to each other about what they just read.

Think-Aloud Protocols – The free response protocol asks students to respond to their reading when something strikes them. There is no specific question they are asking. This is a good practice to get students into as a reading practice. Cued response protocols force students to respond more specifically. This is a good way to get students to write and think more deeply. The two column protocol was designed specifically to make life easier on the researcher. I am not sure if students would get anything more from it than cued response or free response. Visual protocols allowed students to draw their response instead of writing about it. As we see in subsequent chapters, this allows students who have a hard time responding verbally to understand text on a deeper level.

Much of this chapter is devoted to discussing the ten dimensions of reader response that Wilhelm studies. If nothing else, this gives us ten things we should be looking for in our student readers. It also gives us a basis for our own classroom studies. We can look for these characteristics in our students and then figure out how to tweak our instruction to make up for their deficiencies. This chapter exists as “praxis” the place where theory and practice meet.