Experienced readers of literature are more likely than novices to identify aspects of text that are salient to literary interpretation and to construct figurative meanings and thematic inferences from literary texts. This quasi‐experimental study explores the hypothesis that novice readers can be supported in constructing literary interpretations by drawing on and applying everyday interpretive practices to their readings. Specifically, an everyday affect‐based practice can serve as an interpretive heuristic to support the move from a local summary to a range of figurative interpretations. The affect‐based interpretive heuristic involves identifying language in a literary text that a reader feels is particularly affect‐laden, ascribing valence to that language, and then explaining or justifying those ascriptions. In a four‐week, classroom‐based instructional intervention, a 12th‐grade class from a high‐poverty, low‐achieving, urban high school practiced this interpretive heuristic as they read literary texts. A comparative class also engaged in a unit of literary interpretation but did not use the heuristic. Analysis of a pre‐ and poststudy interpretive writing task and clinical think‐aloud protocols from both groups showed that students receiving the intervention made gains in interpretive responses, whereas the comparison group did not. The results suggest that explicit instruction in affect‐driven interpretive heuristics can support novice readers in constructing interpretive readings of literary texts.

Students can readily engage in summary and literal sense-making when reading poems, short stories, and other literary texts, but are often unable to construct inferences and thematic interpretations of these works. This paper discusses the results of an instructional intervention built on an affect-based model of literary interpretation. Students in the intervention group spent four weeks reading and writing about popular and canonical texts, with a focus on poetry. As they read, they identified valence-laden language, made appraisals of valence, and then explained or justified their appraisals. Analyses of pre- and post-test results show that the intervention group made significant gains in the level of interpretive responses to poems compared to a control group of students who were not explicitly taught to engage in affective appraisal. This work sheds light on ways in which affect-based interpretive strategies can support novice readers’ interpretive practices.

This study explored whether a month-long instructional intervention in affective evaluation can help struggling high school readers to engage in literary interpretation in ways similar to expert readers' practices. We compared pre-and post-intervention think-aloud protocols from five high school students as they read a literary short story with the protocols from five experienced English teachers for the same story. After the intervention, student readers attended more frequently to story details that expert readers also found salient to interpretation. Students also made interpretive moves similar to those made by experts, such as inferences about character goals, interpretation of potential symbols, and attention to patterns and juxtapositions in the text. Further, students' focus on interpretively salient details influenced their thematic inferences. These findings suggest that the recruitment of everyday, affect-based practices can help novice readers develop more "expert-like" literary schemata and construct more meaningful interpretations of a literary text.

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Research indicates that feeling is fundamental to the multilayered experience of literary interpretation. However, despite great strides in U.S. high school classrooms, discussions about literature are still often characterized by known-answer discourses that exclude feeling. This article builds on small-scale studies of affective evaluation, an interpretive approach in which readers attend to and reflect on their feeling-based responses to texts. Those studies, focused on individual students, showed that when responding to texts with feeling, students were more likely to build multilayered interpretations as opposed to summary or one-dimensional thematic interpretations. The current study explores affective evaluation in the more complex arena of class discussion, where known-answer discourses are particularly entrenched. We compared the same teachers and students using affective evaluation in one discussion, but not the other. Discussions using affective evaluation were correlated with increased multidimensional interpretation, adding to evidence that feeling enriches students’ literary sense-making and disrupts known-answer discourses.