A cross-cultural study of story transactions among 12 college-level readers in the United States and the People's Republic of China

The purposes of my conducting this multiple case study were to explore the similarities and differences characterizing individual story reading transactions among 12 United States (American) and People's Republic of China (Chinese) university students and graduates, and to uncover the relationship between reading purposes and selective attention in their daily life situations.;To understand the complex nature of story transaction, qualitative design and reader response analysis were used as research tools. The methodology was multiple comparisons of the written responses by three American and three Chinese university students when reading an American and a Chinese short story as a class assignment, and those of three American and three Chinese university graduates when reading the same stories for personal pleasure. The contextual information gained from the interviews and questionnaires were also discussed as explanations for certain idiosyncratic reading behaviors.;I found that students reading for classes focused their attention more on discourse analyses, thus resulting in more uniform and structured after-reading responses; whereas graduates reading for pleasure were more interested in enjoying the content of the stories, resulting in more detailed and personal during-reading responses. The American readers in the study were more descriptive and self-involving, while the Chinese readers in the study were more prescriptive and socially conscious. All the readers were more critical of the stories from their own cultures than the ones from different cultures.;As a summary, I theorized the themes found in the study. This study supported Rosenblatt's view that reading is a purposeful event occurring in a specific cultural context. The major discovery of the study was that both discourse and event structure building can be considered as efferent or aesthetic reading, depending on the depth of individual involvement in the reading transaction. This individual involvement can be measured by the response patterns--interpretation, association, self-involvement, and evaluation. Similar to the efferent-aesthetic continuum that Rosenblatt proposed, I suggested a continuum of reading modes--a discourse-event continuum, which shows how an individual transacts with a story either as a reader being entertained or as a writer evaluating and experiencing other's writing.