Personal response activities:
These activities want you to relate the content of the passage to your own life, your own experiences and opinions.
It wants you to respond to the passage by connecting some aspect of it to your own life and ideas, to give a personal response.
This style of activity is often used to test reading purpose.
One of the clearest ways to check if someone has this skill is to get them to measure the attitudes, ideas and beliefs in a passage against their own.
In other words these activities force you to make some kind of judgement.
You will meet personal response activities at all levels because they suit important criteria which must be met in Standard Grade Reading, that students can,
comment relevantly on some aspects of the author's point of view and show some skill in justifying the comment from personal experience and knowledge, and evidence in the text.
Comment relevantly on a clearly defined aspect of the author's point of view and justify the comment from personal experience and knowledge and from evidence in the text.
Comment simply and intelligibly on an aspect of the author's point of view that has been clearly defined and relate it to personal experience.
Personal Response activities should not come as a surprise and should not present much of a problem if you have been actively reading the passage.
Consider and judge what you are reading as you read it.
As you absorb the content be confident enough to agree/disagree, approve/disapprove.
Be aware of the style and the tone used in the passage and judge how they affect you.
Write feelings and ideas they plant in your mind
At the end of a passage try to have a genuine opinion, for example.
I enjoyed that because ...............
or
I didn't enjoy that because ................
Often there is no straightforward right or wrong answer to Personal Response activities.
To gain full marks you need to justify your answer with connections between your view and the passage.
List of Personal Response Activities
1. Agree or disagree with the writer's
views/for or against opinion
2. Reaction to the situation
3. Suggestions or solutions on the
problem
4. Seeking opinions with
justification
5. Self-experience
6. Parallel experience
7. Commenting or criticizing on the
writer's point of view I opinions I thoughts etc.
8. Give reason/s
9. List the changes that you would
bring in yourself
10. Describe the impact or effect
of the message given in the passage on your mind
