Research in literary response indicates that in classroom contexts, high school students have difficulty constructing thematic interpretations of literary texts, tending instead to summarize or build happiness-bound morals that ignore a text’s potentially negative tones. However, studies in out-of-school contexts show students building thematic interpretations that include positive and negative elements. These conflicting findings suggest that some challenges of thematic interpretation lie not in students’ interpretive limitations but in school-based discourses that define thematic interpretation. In this study, students constructed thematic interpretations with sentence stems using everyday interpretive language, such as “Reading this story suggests the world can be a place where _____.” With no additional instruction, experimental groups constructed more thematic interpretations and made fewer happiness-bound interpretations than a comparison group. Results suggest that students are more capable of thematic interpretation than some research indicates and that everyday interpretive language may help disrupt students’ school-based framing of thematic interpretation.

对文学反应的研究表明，在课堂环境中，高中生很难建构文学文本的主题解释，而是倾向于总结或建立忽视文本潜在负面语气的，束缚幸福的道德观念。但是，在校外环境中的研究表明，学生在构建主题解释时会包含正面和负面的内容。这些矛盾的发现表明，主题解释的一些挑战不在于学生的解释局限性，而在于定义主题解释的校本课程。在这项研究中，学生使用日常的解释语言来构建带有句子主干的主题解释，例如“阅读这个故事表明世界可能是一个_____的地方。” 没有其他说明，与比较组相比，实验组对主题的解释更多，对幸福感的解释更少。结果表明，学生比某些研究表明的具有更强的主题解释能力，而且日常的解释性语言可能有助于扰乱学生对学校的主题解释框架。