LITERARY ELEMENTS IN EFL STUDENTS’ RESPONSESTO FICTION WORKS

The research findings indicated that in each category, the EFL students focused on some elements and did not care the rest, and among the four categories, perception had the highest exte

CANTHO UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF EDUCATION ENGLISH EDUCATION DEPARTMENT

Cantho, April 2011

Secondly, I am extremely grateful to Ms Nguyen Thi Van Su and Mr Do Xuan Hai who gave me valuable comments to improve my thesis

Thirdly, I would like to express my thanks to Ms Ngo Thi Trang Thao for caring and encouraging me to finish this study

Last but not least, I have my close friends, Phan Huynh Thanh Truc and Ly Thi Anh Tuyet, to thank for helping me analyze the response journals and I wish to send my deep gratitude to the students of English Education especially ones whose course is

thirty-four for allowing me to analyze heir response journals

ABSTRACT

This research was conducted to investigate the EFL Students’ response to fiction works which they learnt in “Introduction to America and British Literature” class The research was expected to find out what literary elements appear and the extent of their appearance in the EFL students’ response journals to fiction works The research applied the method used in a previous similar study by Purves and Rippere (1968) The research data was captured by collecting the response journals to fiction works in the curriculum

of “Introduction to America and British Literature” class from the EFL students The thirty-two journals collected were analyzed by four analyzing boards which were designed based on the system of literary elements in the study of Purves and Rippere The literary elements were classified into four categories: engagement-involvement, perception, interpretation, and evaluation In each category, there are many specific elements The research findings indicated that in each category, the EFL students focused

on some elements and did not care the rest, and among the four categories, perception had the highest extent of appearance in the EFL students’ response journals

TÓM TẮT

Nghiên cứu này được thực hiện nhằm điều tra mức phản hồi của sinh viên chuyên ngành tiếng Anh đối với các tác phẩm truyện ngắn được học trong lớp “Dẫn luận văn chương Anh Mĩ” Nghiên cứu được mong đợi sẽ tìm ra những yếu tố văn chương xuất hiện trong những bài viết phản hồi của sinh viên tiếng Anh đối với các truyện ngắn và mức độ xuất hiện của chúng trong các bài viết đó Nghiên cứu này áp dụng phương pháp của một nghiên cứu tương tự trước đây được tiến hành bởi Purves và Rippere(1968) Nghiên cứu lấy dữ liệu từ việc thu thập những bài viết sinh viên chuyên ngành tiếng Anh phản hồi các tác phẩm truyện ngắn trong chương trình học của lớp “Dẫn luận văn chương” Ba mươi hai bài viết sau khi thu thập được phân tích bởi bốn bảng phân tích thiết kế dựa trên hệ thống những yếu tố văn chương trong nghiên cứu của Purves và Rippere Những yếu tố văn chương được phân chia thành bốn nhóm: phản ứng, nhận thức, liên tưởng, và đánh giá đối với những nội dung, hình thức, biện pháp nghệ thuật trong tác phẩm Mỗi một nhóm lại có từng yếu tố đặc trưng Kết quả nghiên cứu cho thấy trong từng nhóm yếu tố, sinh viên chuyên ngành tiếng Anh chỉ tập trung vào một số yếu

tố và không quan tâm đến những yếu tố còn lại, và giữa bốn nhóm yếu tố với nhau thì nhóm yếu tố nhận thức có mức độ xuất hiện cao nhất trong những bài viết phản hồi của sinh viên

TABLE OF CONTENT Pages

Acknowledgement i

Abstract ii

Table of content iv

List of tables vii

List of figures vii

Chapter 1 Introduction 1

1.1 Statement of the problem 1

1.2 Aims of the study and research questions 2

1.3 General organization of the study 2

Chapter 2 Literature Review 3

1 Response to literature and its role 3

1.1 Definition of response 3

1.2 Definition of response to literature 3

1.3 The role of response to literature 4

2 Response to literature through the journals 5

3 Review of classifications of the elements in response journals 5

3.1 The classification of Guerin 5

3.2 The classification of Squire 6

3.3 The classification of Purves and Rippere 7

4 The elaboration of elements in the response journals in Purves’ and Rippere’s study ……… 8

4.1 Engagement-Involvement 8

4.1.1 Reaction to author 9

4.1.2 Assent to the work 9

4.1.3 Moral taste 9

4.1.4 Re-creation of the effect of the work 9

4.1.5 Word associations 9

4.1.6 Retelling the work in a form different from the author’s 9

4.1.7 Moral reaction 9

4.1.8 Conjecture 9

4.1.9 Identification of the writer with the work 10

4.2 Perception 10

4.2.1 Objective perception 10

4.2.2 Reading comprehension 10

4.2.3 Perception of language 10

4.2.4 Literary devices 10

4.2.5 Content 11

4.2.6 Relation of technique to content 11

4.2.7 Perception of structure 11

4.2.8 Tone 11

4.2.9 Literary classification 11

4.3 Interpretation 11

4.3.1 Interpretive context 11

4.3.2 The use of part as key to the interpretation of the whole 12

4.3.3 Interpretation of style 12

4.3.4 Interpretation about the past or present 12

4.3.5 Character analysis 12

4.3.6 Inference about setting 12

4.3.7 Inference about author 12

4.3.8 Interpretation of the whole 12

4.4 Evaluation 13

4.4.1 Citation of criteria 13

4.4.2 Affective evaluation 13

4.4.3 Evaluation of the author’s method 13

4.4.4 Evaluation of the author’s vision 13

5 Justification of the present study 13

Chapter 3 Research methodology 15

1 Research design 15

2 Participants 15

3 Instrument 16

4 Procedure 17

4.1 Data collection 17

4.2 Data analysis 17

Chapter 4 Results and discussion 19

1 Result and discussion of each category 19

1.1 Result 19

1.1.1 Engagement-Involvement 19

1.1.2 Perception 22

1.1.3 Interpretation 24

1.1.4 Evaluation 26

1.2 Discussion 28

2 Result and discussion of the four categories 30

2.1 Result 30

2.2 Discussion 31

Chapter 5 Implication, limitation, recommendation and conclusion 32

1 Implications 32

2 Limitations 32

3 Recommendation for further research 33

4 Conclusion 33

References 34

Appendix A 35

Appendix B 37

LIST OF TABLE

1 Table 1 16

2 Table 2 18

LIST OF FIGURE 1 Figure 4.1 21

2 Figure 4.2 23

3 Figure 4.3 25

4 Figure 4.4 27

Figure 4.5

Chapter one INTRODUCTION

1 Statement of the problem

In the classroom of literature, the students after learning literary works are requested to express their feelings, thoughts in discussions or to write them down in the journals There is such request since for the teachers, teaching literature must consider not only the literary work but also the way in which students respond to a literary work (Squire, 1964) However, in a report of National Council of teacher of English, Purves and Rippere claim that the students’ response to literature is like an iceberg (Purves and Rippere, 1968) That means there are some visible and invisible parts in the students’ response to literature The students’ response is partly visible with their opinions, ideas spoken out in the discussions or written in their journals Whereas, there is not enough time for every student to show what they want to say in a discussion, and it is not easy to understand completely what the students respond through their journals because of complicated structures, and expressions That is the reason why the students’ response to literature is almost unclear to their teachers

This problem also occurs in the courses of foreign literature of English-majored students in Cantho University Catching the students’ response to literature unclearly, the teachers may encounter some difficulties to know how much their students understand a literary work and what they think of that work So this research is carried out to discover the students’ response to literature to help the teachers have a clear view of their students’ limits and weaknesses in responding to literature It is hoped that there will be some improvements from teachers to develop students’ response to a higher level

This thesis is based on the study of response to literature which is conducted by Purves and Ripperes With the aim of discovering the iceberg in students’ response to literature, these researchers posed a specific formulation of content analysis for the high school students’ response journals to literary works This formulation is applied in the present study to analyze the response journals of the CTU English-majored students in the course “Introduction to America and British Literature” Beside the purpose of discovering the CTU students’ response to literature, the research is also concerned with

the differences and similarities in response to literature between the high school students

in the previous study and English-majored students in Can tho University

2 Statement of the aims and research questions

Focusing on discovering the students’ response to literature, this research aims to identify literary elements that appear in the English-majored students’ response journals and the frequency of these elements in the journals With this purpose, the research investigates the following questions:

 What literary elements appear in the English-majored students’ response journals

to the fiction works in the course of the “Introduction to American and British Literature”?

 How often do these elements occur in these response journals?

3 General Organization

This research consists of five chapters and three appendices

Chapter one is an introduction of the research in which the statements of the problem, research aims and research questions are presented

Chapter two, Literature Review, is the review of previous studies in response’s role in learning, student’s response to literature, and elements of writing about literary works These studies play the role of foundation for this research

Chapter three is a general description of the research design, participant, materials, and procedure, the periods in the process of the research

Chapter four, Results and Discussion, displays data analysis, syntheses of statistics, and discusses the similar and different points in finding between the present study and the previous ones

Chapter five includes the implications for teaching from the findings of this research Also, the limitations of this research are mentioned

The three appendices contain the system of literary elements of writing about a literary work which is withdrawn from the study of Purves and Rippere (1968), the four tables designed to analyze the students’ response journals, and the quotations of the statements from the students’ response journals

Chapter two LITERATURE REVIEW

The literature review falls into four sections The first section, Response to literature and its roles, contains the definition and importance of response to literature, withdrawn from a variety of studies The second section, Response to literature through the journals, presents the reason why the research on students’ response to literature is conducted through gathering and analyzing the students’ response journals The third one, the ways of classifying the elements in the response journals, shows a review of the studies about classifications of elements occurring in the response journals The forth selection, the elaboration of elements in the response journals in Purves’ and Rippere’s study, describes the specific literary elements in each category And the closing section, justification of the present study, summarizes the literature and indicates the implications this thesis achieves from the literature

With this characteristic, response is considered as one of the three moves in the exchange of a conversation, including initiating move, responding move and the follow-

up (Sinclair and Coulthard, 1975) In a conversation, it is initiation that occurs first to lead a response For example:

A: Shall we go out tonight? Initiation

B: Oh, that’s awesome Response

In the initiation-response sequence, the response can be an answer, comment or an expression of acknowledgement to what mentioned in the initiation

1.2 Definition of response to literature

This kind of response also needs an initiation which is literature Like the initiation-response sequence, response to literature is the process in which the reader

reacts in mind and feeling to the literacy texts (Rosenblatt, 1938) However, Purves and Rippere (1968) claims that it is not easy to have a specific definition for response to literature since this type of response, a form being full of senses and emotion, belongs to the mental fields It “encompasses the cognitive, affective, perceptual, and psychomotor activities” which are performed by the reader of a poem or story (p xiii)

1.3 The role of response to literature

Response to literature is the process in which the reader reacts in mind and feeling

to the literacy texts containing various contents, so there exists an interaction between the reader and the literacy text Concerning about this, Louise Rosenblatt proposed the notions related in 1938 and brought them to more full development in 1978 Rosenblatt (1978) asserts that the reader’s view not only actively makes meaning but also brings something new to the transactions between the reader and literacy texts In fact, the reader’s response joins the re-creation of the literary works Analyzing the studies in reading response, Dias and Hayhoe(1988) agrees with Rosenblatt’s thinking and gives supplementary notion of Bleich (1975, 1978))“that reading is a wholly subjective process and that the nature of what is perceived is determined by the rules of the personality of the perceiver” (1975, p.3) These theories, to sum up, affirms the role of the reader whose minds and view points are deciding factors in the transaction between the reader and the literacy text ; the reader is considered as active performer rather than passive receiver in response to literature

In section one, the importance of response which has been presented in general also occurs in response to literature That means response to literature is a part of output process and manifests the attitude of the readers In particular, response to literature is the target of the literature language classroom and a useful instrument for the EFL students in reading Firstly, that response to literature is considered as the target is mentioned in

“Literary Reading and Classroom Constraints” by Dias (1992) Dias supposes that the main and most important goal of teaching literature is to bring up the growth of independent readers Collie and Slater(1987) make this idea clearer through insisting that the point of the activities and tasks related to literature in the language classroom is to increase the students’ confidence so that they can develop, express and value their own response The students are expected to become more and more independent on received opinions and to find it interested and able to assess other perspectives Secondly, the

function of response to literature is stated in the theories of Gambrell(1986) and Hickman (1983) The way the students respond to what they read help themselves develop deeper understandings and relate the contents in the stories to their own experiences In brief, response to literature is the aim of teaching literature in EFL class and also the key for the students to open up limitless prospect of discovering the new language and finding out themselves

2 Response to literature through the journals

Response to literature can be expressed through both speaking and writing Like speaking, writing can develop a personal voice by expressing the writer's emotion and thoughts in words Moreover, in writing the students have more time to think of the best ideas with the best expressions The form of response writings, often called response journals, is very popular in the class of literature The research conducted by Heather indicates that the students like the response journal because it is interesting and low pressured (Heather, 2000) Also, the freedom of this kind of writing allows the students

to write in the way they like without concerning the requirement of well-formed paragraphs, careful editing, or a thesis This plays a significant role in response to literature because the good state of mentality can highly impulse the development of students’ response to literature (Dias, 1992) In brief, through the response journals, the students have many advantages to express their response to literature clearly and effectively This is also the reason why response journals have been used in the studies on response to literature for a long time

3 Review of classifications of the elements in response journals

A variety of literary elements have been drawn since the early nineteenth century, the time of the initial studies on the literary field such as Rosenblatt’s A majority of these elements are ones occurring in writing especially the journals responding to literary works Up to now there have been many ways of classifying these elements by many researchers

3.1 The classification of Guerin

Guerin (1966) shows a classification of elements in critical approaches to various types of literary works with seven categories including textual-linguistic, historical-

biographical, moral-philosophical, formalistic, psychological, archetypal, and typological

The category of textual-linguistic includes the elements about the language use, figure of speech and literary devices that the author uses in his work

Historical-biographical refers to the setting of the work and also the biography of the author The reasons or the inspiration urging the author to write the work also belong

Archetypal refers to the way the reader refers some symbols or characters in the work to something real or heroes in the real life

Typological is concerned with classifying the work in a specific literary classification, like “this work is a love story” or “this is a realistic work” To classify the works in such classifications, the reader bases on any incidents in the work

3.2 The classification of Squire

In early research done by Squire (1964), he also brings one out Classified by Squire, the elements of response to literature fall into seven categories which are literary judgments, interpretational response, narrational reactions, associational responses, self-involvement, prescriptive judgments, and miscellaneous

Literary judgements refer to the reader’s judgments on the literary or aesthetic qualities of the work, like “It’s effective”, or “It’s good”

Interpretational responses include the reader’s referring to the incidents in the works to generalize the meaning of the whole work

Narrational reactions are responses in which the reader just describes what happens in the work without interpretation

Associational responses are responses in which the reader associates everything in the work with his own experience in his world

Self-involvement refers to the reader’s associating himself with the behavior or emotion of the character in the work

Prescriptive judgments refer to the reader’s plans or suggestions for the character

in the work For example, “She ought to do this”, or “That old man shouldn’t go out that night”

Miscellaneous includes the elements which were not mentioned in the categories above

3.3 The classification of Purves and Rippere

During the time of researching on the ways the writers with different backgrounds write about a literary work, Purves (1968) realized the need of a method of content analysis, a critically, impartial and readily comprehensible theory, which would assist the researchers in analyzing a great variety of responses He thinks that the categories classified in Guerin's theory seem too general for the analysis of essays which asks for more specific and detailed distinct groups of elements The categories Squire suggested

in Purves’ opinion are still overlapped and like Guerin's This way lacks a clear distinction among the groups classified What Purves wants to have in the method he desires is a higher degree of discrimination and specific description in the categories of elements in reader's response to literature So he continues to find out another better classification

Through an examination of the responses Purves finds that the best division for the elements of literature might be based on the reader's attitude towards the works which appears from the relationship between the reader with his world and the literary works In advance, he considers the literary work as a verbal communication in which through the content and the form of the work, the author expresses his intellect or imagination which creates inside the reader a particular feeling and attitude Relating the audience and his relationship to the work, the universe of which the work treats, and the artist, Purves draws out four general relationships: the direct interaction between the reader and the work, the reader's viewing of the work and its author, the reader's relating the world in the work to the world the reader conceives, and the reader's judgment of the work These four relationships define the categories into which the elements fall They are engagement-involvement, perception, interpretation, evaluation Ensuring the distinctions among the four categories as well as the clear description in each category, this

classification could almost include all possibilities of discovering the reader’s response lying under their response writings

First of all, the category of engagement-involvement includes the elements which express how the reader experiences everything of the literary work such as the incidents, characters, plot, etc., what he feels about or think of these items, and what he reacts to what he experiences

The second category, perception, refers to the reader’s level of understanding the work he responds to Understanding the work here means the reader can catch everything the author tried to present in the work Perception elements simply appear when the reader cites or paraphrases any statements from the work What the reader writes in the response journal cannot be beyond the work

If in the category of perception, the work is considered the only object that the reader analyzes and describes, the third category, interpretation, on the other hand, concerns what apart from the work That means the reader makes inferences from the incidents, characters in the work to something and someone similar in the reader’s world

In this way, the reader applies his own experience to respond the work

And the last category, evaluation, is about the reader’s representing why the work

is good or bad For evaluating the work, the reader is supposed to base on the elements of engagement-involvement, perception or interpretation to come to his judgment The author’s style, literacy devices and the success of the work are ones which are evaluated Furthermore, this type of elements includes the effect the author and his work bring to the reader This refers to the lessons, moral items and significant meanings withdrawn from the author’s vision

It is clear that Guerin and Squire classify the elements in response to literature into too many categories whose definition are abstract and complicated to the students at B.A level On the contrary, the classification introduced by Purves and Rippere are really succinct and easy to comprehend with only four categories and obvious distinction among them Another reason that the researcher highly appreciates the study of Purves and Rippere is that they did make deep reference to a variety of previous studies on the field of response to literature The study by Squire and one by Purves’ and Rippere’s are both the research reports of The National Council of Teacher of English (NCTE), which are expert in the fields related to English Education with large-scale studies carried out by

popular professors in many well-known universities in Europe and America Squire’s study is No.2 and Purves’ and Ripper’s is No.9 while both of them have nearly same participants, the adolescents Similar to Squire’s study, censored by the same council, but conducted later, the study of Purves and Rippere must have been improved a lot from reviewing Squire’s study These reasons lead to the researcher’s decision to choose the classification introduced in Purves’ and Rippere’s study as the basis to analyze the response journals collected from the English-majored students in Cantho University

4 The elaboration of elements in the response journals in Purves’ and Rippere’s study

As mentioned above, in the classification presented in Purves’ and Rippere’s, there are four categories of elements occurring in students’ response to literature, including engagement-involvement, perception, interpretation, and evaluation In each of the category, these two researchers pose the specific elements and describe them in detail Following are the descriptions of the specific elements in each of four categories

4.1 Engagement-Involvement

The engagement-involvement elements are described to demonstrate the reader's reaction to literature, form and content of the work This category consists of nine specific literary elements, reaction to author, assent to the work, moral taste, re-creation

of the effect of the work, word associations, retelling the work in a form different from the author’s, moral reaction, conjecture, identification of the writer with the work

4.1.2 Assent to the work

Assent to the work refers to the statements in the response journal in which the reader recognizes the existence of the work whether this existence may be separate from the real world

For example: To appreciate Tolken’s novel, I had to forego my distaste for the supernatural; then I could read

4.1.3 Moral taste

Moral taste refers to the statements about the morality of the work or of the author For example: The novel occasionally hovers on the verge of being tasteless

because of the author’s clinical and descriptive approach to his subject matter

4.1.4 Rre-creation of the effect of the work

With this element, the reader uses metaphor to describe the parts related to the form of the work such as plot, climax, rising action, etc

For example: The climax comes like a blow with a sledge hammer

4.1.5 Word associations

The reader is supposed to state his own personal feelings or associations towards a particular word

For example: The words of the title make me think of violence

4.1.6 Retelling the work in a form different from the author’s

In reaction to form, the reader sometimes does not agree or satisfy with the author’s arrangement in parts of the work

For example: If I had written the story, I wouldn’t have made the ending so happy

For example: I think that they will probably live happily ever after

4.1.9 Identification of the writer with the work

This element is expressed through the statements in which the reader shows his involvement in the situations set in the work

For example: It seem like I was right next to Fabrice on the battle field

4.2 Perception

The category of perception includes nine specific literary elements, objective perception, reading comprehension, perception of language, literary devices, content, and relation of technique to content, perception of structure, tone, and literary classification

For example: Since I don’t really know what “squalor” is, I didn’t get the story

“For Esmee with Love and Squalor”

For example: The characters in the story are Rhoda and all her victims

4.2.6 Relation of technique to content

Relation of technique to content includes the elements which relate the verbal, stylistic to the sense and effect of the work

For example: Jonas’ use of a paradox reflects the confused situation in which he

finds himself

4.2.7 Perception of structure

Perception of structure is simply the element of describing the order of the work

For example: The section in which she breaks his glasses has all of the conflicts

which are in the rest of the story

4.3.1 Interpretive context

This element occurs when the reader compares the contexts in the real world to a situation or an incident in the work

For example: Society is made up of the rulers and the ruled

4.3.2 The use of part as the key to the interpretation of the whole

This element refers to inferences about the general conclusions which the reader inheres from some details in the work

For example: The last stanza provides an answer to all the questions of meaning raised in the work

This element is found out in the statements in which the reader infers about the past or present in the work without moving beyond the facts given in the text

For example: Claudius undoubtedly did kill Hamlet’s father

4.3.5 Character analysis

Character analysis refers to the reader’s generalization about the character This generalization is based on the knowledge of the reader

For example: Liar grows from a petty, foolish king to a humble human being

4.3.6 Inference about setting

This element refers to the reader’s making inference about the setting of the work from the clues in the work itself

For example: From the few details we have, the story must have taken place at the turn of the century

4.3.7 Inference about author

This refers to statements about the inference made by the readers to the author’s intention in writing the work or the relationship between the author and the characters, incidents in the work

For example: I think Tennyson had Dante in mind when he wrote “Ulysses”

4.3.8 Interpretation of the whole

In the elements of interpretation of the whole, the world of the work is like a mirror of the human world The reader considers what happen in the work as reflection of

a fact in real life

For example: Dickens shows us the confrontation of the autocrat and the peasant

4.4 Evaluation

The last category, evaluation, consists of four specific literary elements, citation of criteria, affective evaluation, evaluation of the author’s method, evaluation of the author’s vision

4.4.1 Citation of criteria

This element refers to the reader’s definition of the standard for the work

For example: A good novel should deal with serious issues

4.4.2 Affective evaluation

The element of affective evaluation is related to the emotional aspect The success

or failure of the work is dependent on whether the author is able to create a high degree

of intensity in the work in order to make the reader moving or not

For example: “A Snake of One’s Own” is a beautiful and moving story

4.4.3 Evaluation of the author’s method

This element is expressed through the reader’s judgment on the way the author creates the work

For example: The author has succeeded in connecting each incident to every other

4.4.4 Evaluation of the author’s vision

Evaluation of the author’s vision refers to the judgment on whether the author could bring meaningful lessons from the work to the readers and why the work is worth reading, etc

For example: The novel is worthwhile, for it does not tell us how to live, but what life is

5 Justification of the present study

From the review of literature related to studies of response to literature, it can be firstly seen that response to literature plays an important role in learning literature It helps the students not only understand clearly the literary works they learn but also discover the new meanings of the works through reacting to various aspects of the work, including content, language use, author, and literary devices, etc of the works Secondly, response to literature is the field which has been researched for a long time Based on analyzing the useful and effective samples which are the students’ response journals, the system of literary elements in response to literature has gradually developed to a specific formulation of content analysis for response journals The more specific this formulation

is, the more reliable and convenient the analysis of the present study is Also, knowing the students’ response to literature specifically, teachers can catch the strengths and limits

of their students in learning literature In short, the various points of view and results from previous studies on students’ response to literature ensure a firm theoretical basis and the significance for the present study

Chapter three RESEARCH METHODOLOGY

This chapter focuses on describing four parts, Research Design, Participants, Instrument, and Procedure The description of procedures consists of two parts, data collection and data analysis

2 Participants

The target population of this research is the English-majored students in Cantho University In this population, there are two majors related to English, English Education and English Language Study And all of them have to take the course “Introduction to America and British Literature” with nearly the same content However, at the time the research was initiated, the two classes of English Education students were taught by the same teacher Therefore, they were selected as the participants in order to ensure the reliability of the research

The participants for this research are 32 third-year students chosen randomly from the two classes of “Introduction to America and British Literature” in English Education Department in the first semester of the school year 2010-2011 The participants include 6 males and 26 females whose ages are from 21 to 25 years old Each of them wrote a journal to respond to a literary work they learnt in this course The general characteristics

of the participants are demonstrated on table 1

Table 1: characteristics of participants (N = 32)

to carry out a pilot study with 300 response journals by students at the age of thirteen and seventeen from the United States, Great Britain, Belgium, and Germany Based on the formulation, each of the essays was analyzed by three independent readers who had bachelor’s degrees And the result was found that two out of three readers agreed on close

to 90 percent of judgment on those response journals

With that reliable result, the formulation of content analysis by Purves and Rippere is applied in this research Based on the four distinctive categories in the formulation, the four tables, each of which represents one of four categories of elements (engagement-involvement, perception, interpretation, and evaluation) were formed as the instruments for this research In each category, there are many specific elements For example, the category of perception elements includes the elements of objective perception, reading comprehension, language, literary devices, content, relation of technique to content, structure, tone, and literary classification Each column of the table contains every specific element belong to the category that table represents Every response journal was analyzed using all these four tables (Appendix B)