Students as Literary Critics: The Interpretive Experiences, Beliefs, and Processes of Ninth-Grade Students

The interpretive beliefs, processes, and instructional experiences of 8 ninth-grade students were studied as they participated in instructional subcommunities within their existing English classes. An observational analysis of the instructional communities was undertaken, and the students' interpretive processes were analyzed as intertextual transactions, which include reasoning operations and inference sources. Overall results revealed that students reasoned about literary works at an interpretive level, and that their inferences were largely textual focussing on characters and events, reflecting the type of literary instruction they receive. After participating in an alternative response-centered instructional unit, students were more intertextual in terms of their preferences related to the interpretive process and more interpretive in their reasoning about literary works. The shift in the range of inference sources students drew on—the intertextuality of their transactions—varied by individual. Individual students were profiled to reveal the relationship of beliefs, experiences, and processes that form their critical interpretive stances toward literary works.