Winning Words Lesson Guide (Adults) Winnning Words Lesson Plan Guide | Page 10

Your Personal Response
Read the title of Martin Boyce’s short story and spend a few moments reflecting on it.
Next, jot down the ways this idiom is typically used in daily language. Based on what
you know already about the idiom thin line between, what do you think this story
might be about? As a reader, this is your first response to this text.
Group Reading Activity
Now form a group of four persons. Briefly discuss your personal predictions of the
story with the members of your interpretive community. Following this, everyone in
the community conducts a preliminary reading of the story. Afterwards, choose ONE
(1) community member to perform a dramatic reading for everyone else in the
interpretive community.
Reader Response? Whuz dah?
It’ s an idea about reading which suggests
that every reader interacts personally with
literature to extract meaning, and com-
pares a text against personal experiences. It
is based on Rosenblatt’s (1980) framework
that a very important transaction occurs
between the reader and the text. This trans-
action is a social one because the text is the
means by which one human being (the
writer) communicates human experience
to another human being (the reader). It is
through the interaction between reader and
text that a transaction happens.