Reader-Response Criticism Theory And English Literature Reading Teaching

English Literature teaching is a compulsory course for the English majors, especially for the juniors and seniors. Through introducing the main writers and classical works from English literature, students can get a general idea of the development of the foreign literature and further help to cultivate readers'analytical ability, appreciative ability and so on. It can enhance readers'language awareness and linguistic competence by getting in touch with the characteristics, variations and development of the English language in different periods. It may enlarge readers'span of knowledge on the target society such as its history, geography, politics, economy and culture.The traditional literature reading teaching lays emphasis on the intensive reading and teacher's explanation in detail. This approach comes from New Criticism in 1920s-1930s, which emphasizes the textual analysis research. The New Critics believes that if studied thoroughly, the text would reveal its own meaning, and the text itself contains what's needed to discover its meaning. Thus this research approach ignores the readers'autonomy, which is reflected on the literature reading teaching like this: students lose their initiative and confidence in literature learning. On the contrary, Reader-response Criticism Theory emphasizes that readers take a different view on the same text on the ground of their own background biases, expectations, reading ability and so forth. Different readers may come up with different interpretations to the same literary text and play active role in the interpretation of meaning of the literary text. Reader-response Criticism Theory plays a vital role in the reform of the English literature reading teaching. This thesis mainly studies English literature reading teaching influenced by Reader-response Criticism Theory.Reader-response Criticism Theory originating from the literary criticism, places the role of reader in the foreground of reading process. It challenges traditional focus on authorial intention in a text and the text itself, and puts the relation between reader and text as the main research subject. It further mainly emphasizes the readers' interpretation. The text itself is considered incomplete, and the meaning of the literary text only come form the interaction between reader and text in the reading procedure. Students integrate the literary text by decoding it with their own mind and experience, and students may come up with different interpretations with certain social, cultural and historical quality. That is, the reader's interpretation of the literary text describes not the text itself but how the reader recreated it while reading it. In the English literature reading teaching class the teacher need to encourage students'different interpretations of literary text meaning, different innovative reading experience. A questionnaire is developed to investigate the current situation of English literature reading teaching and the factors influencing students'different active interpretations to the literary text. To find out reasons for this situation, and ways to change it, the present author has made a detailed study of the reality of English literature reading teaching in China. The purpose of this thesis is to show how reader-Response theory might be applied in English literature reading teaching in the EFL class. By eliciting the students'interpretations to the literary text, making reading logs and strengthen cultural input by the teacher, students can get higher advance in analytical and appreciative ability of English literature.