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students.
The reading response questionnaire was intended to provide and promote a basis for
transactions between individual readers and literary texts (Rosenblatt, 1995). In its
own right, it was to become an opinionnaire (Rosenblatt, 1995) by asking students to
express their opinions and feelings about what they read both in and out of class. I
thought, in the long run this activity might became a powerful instrument for students
to interpret complex elements of the texts that they would be asked to read. Thus this
activity laid the groundwork for developing their response potential along with an
awareness of their reading styles and strengths. The questionnaire had the following
six questions and the students filled them out on a weekly basis:
1. What did you read? (Show your ideas in words or phrases only)
2. What problems did you have while reading?
3. What interested you in the reading?
4. What new vocabulary did you learn?
5. How would you connect your reading to your life?
6. Extra comments.
I used the reading response questionnaire to provoke response from students and to
lay the groundwork for building a positive attitude to reading. I hypothesized that my
students might use it as an instrument for nurturing awareness of reading thereby
developing a keen aptitude for reading. The six questions I used in the questionnaire
were meant to develop cognitive, affective or evaluative and actional dimensions in
my students’ reading. Therefore, I had to use this instrument with care and sensitivity.
I did not impose the questionnaire on my students. On the contrary, I suggested that it
might be good practice for them to fill it in on a regular basis so as to improve their
thinking and understanding of what they read in the texts. However my students
found it a motivating experience to fill in the questionnaires on a weekly basis and by
the end of the sixty hour course, each student had filled in more than a hundred
reading response questionnaires.
When I sifted through the questionnaires at the end of the reading programme, I
noticed a number of similarities and uniformities in them. These appeared to form
conceptual patterns and categories. A closer scrutiny revealed remarkable patterns of
congruencies and connections in the responses expressed by the students during the
programme. Interestingly enough, these patterns of congruencies and connections had
a backwash effect on my perceptions of students’ performance during the different