I was first drawn to Rosenblatt's distinction between two stances that a reader can take to a text, when I set out to discover in more detail what could be said to characterise a meaningful response to the work of another writer:

The difference between these kinds of reading lies... in what the reader does, where he or she turns her attention during the transaction with the text. In an efferent reading, the reader's interest is focused mainly on what is to be taken away from the transaction. In an aesthetic transaction the reader's attention is focused on what he is living through during the reading event.' [Rosenblatt]

I was provoked into making this search for a kind of response that would be meaningful for both the reader and the writer, by the increasingly efferent approach that teachers were being encouraged to take to their assessment of pupil writing (especially their stories). Little attention was directed to the unique meaning of each piece; rather 'evidence' of pupil performance was based on generalised check lists related to specific skills.

As an alternative to efferent extraction and analysis, I came to distinguish and to develop two related forms of aesthetic response:

engagement: the 'lived through experience' of the act of reading another's text, in which the thoughts, feelings and impressions of the reader interact with those expressed by the writer as the text is interpreted and meanings are evoked;

appreciation: at which point the reader's attention is directed more specifically to how the way in which the text was composed, the form of presentation, enabled the reader to engage with it meaningfully.

I also came to realise, as a writer myself, how frustrating it is to receive what I came to call a 'Yes, but...' response from a reader whose attention has been directed from the start to an agenda of their own devising, which prevented that lived through engagement with potential layers of meaning already residing in the words on the page from being fully activated. Teachers (and supervisers!) have this tendency to look ahead to what needs to be tackled next, rather than paying close attention to what is already there.

To make an aesthetic response, we need to come to a writer's text with an open mind, willing to respond thoughtfully to whatever strikes us as meaningful. In this way, through bringing our own perceptions to those which the writer is seeking (and maybe struggling) to express, we offer an interpretive response which hopefully can take the understanding of both reader and writer further forward. In this respect, we are both reading 'from the inside' and reading 'alongside' as Robyn Pound, an action research colleague puts it.

* Can engaged and appreciative responses have value for action-researchers as they interact with each other's texts on web-sites such as Je Kan's?

* Can the nature of engagement and appreciation be explored further in an action-research context?

* What can such responses offer to a wider community of inter-active readers that both clarifies and extends our understandings of each other's work?

* In what ways is an engaged stance which 'lives through' another's text more or less illuminating than one which seeks to analyse or to argue an alternative point of view?

* In an academic, 'higher degree' context, is it possible that the thoughts a reader brings to a colleague's text might overpower the thoughts of the writer?

* Can we engage with a text with which we totally disagree which arouses strong feelings as well as a rush of lively thoughts? Is there a value in negative as well as positive engagement?

* In my investigation, stories were the chosen genre which involved features such as characterisation, dialogue, pace, significant details and sequencing of events. Could any of these features, as they apply to the narratives of action-researchers, relate engagement to appreciation in a similar way?

* How might we take into consideration a variety of presentational forms for action research, including images as well as words, in ways which extend both engaged and appreciative responses?

* Will it be possible through contributions to web-site responses to explore further the similarities and differences in interpretation as more than one reader responds to the same text?

* Will it be possible to explore further a chain of responses - reader to writer, then writer back to reader commenting on the response(s) (s)he has received?

I think there are exciting possibilities - responses please!