The responses of Taiwanese adolescent girls to selected American short stories for young adults

This qualitative study sought to explore the experience of six Taiwanese 11th-grade English as a Foreign Language (EFL) students in reading six realistic American short stories as they participated in an after-school American Young Adult Literature (YAL) Study Club for a period of six weeks. Informed by reader response theories and research, second language reading and learning theories, and multicultural young adult literature, this study examined the students' literary responses and their cultural awareness when reading across cultures. For literary responses, I tried to answer the questions: What were the students' response patterns? and What did they draw on in order to make sense of the story? For cultural awareness, the two sub-questions guiding the study were: To what extent was the students' cross-cultural awareness demonstrated in their literary responses? and What were their reading stances when reading across cultures? Data sources included questionnaires, response journals, group discussions, and individual interviews.; The findings indicated three levels of literary response: interacting, interpreting, and evaluating, with the latter tending to be built upon the former levels. The students' frames of reference encompassed linguistic, personal, intertextual, and sociocultural dimensions. At the level of interacting, the different frames of reference were drawn upon equally. The sociocultural frame was especially prominent at the level of interpreting while the personal and intertextual frames were more important at the level of evaluating. The primary mode of the students' literary responses was characterized by didactic interpretation of characters, which was greatly influenced by their sociocultural frames of reference. The participants' cultural awareness initially seemed to be limited and needed to be probed to become known. The participants adopted a predominantly aesthetic stance when reading the literature from another culture. Such a stance enabled them to enjoy the literary experience despite cultural differences but also held the promise of potentially broadening the students' cultural perspectives.