A Survey on Developmental Studies of Children's Response to Literature in the United States

The primary purpose of this paper is to survey on developmental studies of Children's responses to literature in the United States, in order to have some suggestions to explore the developmental features of children's responses to literature. Four studies have been examined in this paper; Galda(1983), Hickman(1981), Cullinan, Harwood, & Galda(1983), and Many(1991). As a result, some suggestions for developmental studies of children's responses to literature were pointed out as follows. (1)We need to clarify what is a 'mature' reader. (2)We need to provide some models of readers for children. (3)We need to develop some methods to observe children's responses in classroom contexts. (4)We need to make some scales to evaluate the qualities of children's responses