‘Suddenly, I am part of the poem’: texts as worlds, reader-response and grammar in teaching poetry

This article draws on research into using reader-response theory as a way of thinking about teaching grammar and poetry in the English classroom. Framing my discussion around world-based models of reader-response such as Transactional Theory (Rosenblatt 1938 Rosenblatt, L. 1938. Literature as Exploration. New York, NY: Appleton Century Crofts. [Google Scholar], 1978 Rosenblatt, L. 1978. The Reader, the Text and the Poem. Carbondale and Edwardsville, IL: Southern Illinois University Press. [Google Scholar]) and Text World Theory (Gavins 2007 Gavins, J. 2007. Text World Theory: An Introduction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.[Crossref] , [Google Scholar]; Werth 1999 Werth, P. 1999. Text Worlds: Representing Conceptual Space in Discourse. London: Longman. [Google Scholar]), I argue that this approach is useful in that it foregrounds the creative nature of reading whilst providing a systematic way of analysing language. I analyse data from a series of Key Stage 3 poetry lessons, showing how world-based approaches provide a “concept-driven pedagogical tool” for the teaching of grammar, giving KS3 students the opportunity to build and develop on KS2 grammatical knowledge. I also show how this approach helped to produce authentic responses to literature and generated meta-reflective discussions on the reading process. I argue that this approach offers an intuitive, accessible and contextualised method for exploring how language and grammar work.