Chapter 35 The Role of Responsive Teaching in Focusing Reader Intention and Developing Reader Motivation

Submitted by Debbie Shanks

Robert B. Ruddell and Norman J. Unrau explore the characteristics that influential teachers share when providing motivating literacy lessons to their students. This article looks at Ms. Hawthorne, a new teacher, and her enthusiastic exploration into a better literacy program for her new students. It also looks to the role of the student as an active participant in the literacy process. Through this exploration of both the teacher and student, the authors explore several factors that add to reader and teacher motivation. Ruddell and Unrau then list ways teachers can assist with reader intention and motivation. The authors then point to twelve guidelines for designing Literacy-enhancing instructional environments. Ruddell and Unrau complete the article with a list of nine critically important phenomenons that they feel need to be included in further reading development and literacy studies.


Teachers need to develop reader intention and motivation by providing:
Developing of self:
*Identity and self-schema-when a person has a sense of who they are, a sense of their past, present, and future.
*Sense of self-efficacy and self-worth-what a person believes themselves capable of doing and learning.
*Expectations-influences focus of intention
*Experiential self- controls the focus or attention; works parallel to and simultaneously with the other features, but less consciously and less rationally; processes imagery, narratives and metaphors to give a sense of our experience’s meaning; loose associations among images, stories and analogies.
*Self-knowledge-all that the person knows of his or her own self-system, instructional orientation and task-engagement resources.
*Instructional orientation:
*Achievement goals-the engagement of the learner in selecting, structuring and making sense of achievement experience.
*Task values-attainment value (the importance an individual attributes to a task), intrinsic-interest value (the task’s subjective interest to an individual), utility value (the usefulness of a task in light of a person’s future goals) and the cost of success (the “disadvantages” of accomplishing a task, such as experiencing anxiety).
*Sociocultural values and beliefs-values and beliefs effect the interpretation of texts, relationships with students, and instructional decision making. Breakdowns can occur when sociocultural values and beliefs do not match either the teacher or the student.
*Stance-the perspective and orientation that a reader adopts toward the reading of a particular text; attitude.
*Task-engagement resources-the cognitive tools which include:
*Reader Text-processing Resources:
*Knowledge of language
*Word analysis
*Text-processing strategies
*Metacognitive strategies
*Knowledge of classroom and social interaction
*World knowledge
*Teacher Instructional Design Resources:
*Knowledge of students and their meaning-construction process
*Knowledge of literature and content areas
*Teaching strategies
*World knowledge
*Metacognitive knowledge

Guidelines for Designing Literacy-Enhancing Instructional Environments

*The teacher must allow the student to shape their understanding of the text provided in their own self-schema as well as implement activities that present opportunity for student reflection and self-discovery.
*The teacher must provide the opportunities to build a student’s self-worth.
*The teacher must provide a classroom climate that stresses students working towards task-orientated goals that enhance a sense of mastery and competency.
*The teacher must develop a classroom environment where student’s acquisition of knowledge, skills and strategies is incremental and moves toward independence and self-regulation.
*The teacher must activate and extend students’ background knowledge to assist with the construction of meaning.
*The teacher must model reflectively and metacognitive processes for students.
*The teacher must design tasks that involve real-life situations that are seen by the students’ as being useful outside of the classroom setting or for their future.
*The teacher must provide clear literacy expectations that are designed for each individual student’s abilities and give the support for achieving the abilities to the student’s greatest potential.
*The teacher must be flexible, look at things from multiple perspectives and provide instructional attitudes that promote literacy engagement.
*The teacher must find and use individual students’ sociocultural values and beliefs as resources for providing a classroom environment that reflects the students orientations while also developing an understanding of and tolerance for alternative values and belief systems; a safe environment.
*The teacher must allow for students to have a sense of ownership when reading text. Students must also share in the authority in the interpretation of texts and the criteria for validation of those interpretations.
*The teacher must formulate or select tasks that are suitable to students’ task-engagement resources and that also allows the students to internalize knowledge and skills to become increasingly independent, self-regulating, and self-reliant learners.


Nine critically important phenomenons that warrants further research:
1. How are influential teachers formed? Should teacher preparation programs include essential information to future teachers on how to provide relevant literacy instruction?
2. Which of the factors critical to developing reader and teacher focus of intention is the most effective and lasting motivators and how they interact?
3. How can literacy teachers effectively model, transfer to students and sustain belief in a mastery-goal orientation and the incremental benefits of effortful learning?
4. How could researchers promote literacy engagement from the early years of schooling and also what kind of instruction is needed to foster metacognitition and comprehension?
5. What kinds of student-teacher interactions can take place to encourage a constant motivation for students to continue reading?
6. What type of text and tasks supports a student’s engagement in meaning of what is read?
7. How does a teacher’s exposure to past teaching practices affect their current practice, classroom environments and lessons?
8. How does a teacher’s instructional attitude affect lesson planning, reader intent, and student motivation to read?What effects do a teacher’s need for authority and its role in classroom have on readers’ comprehensio