Reading instruction in secondary English Language Arts (ELA) classrooms takes many forms, with a common approach, the teacher-centered classroom where a traditional transmission pedagogy typically prescribes the single correct reading of any piece of literature through a series of individual, guided activities. A more interactive classroom where the students gain some control over their reading, exchange their reading journals with one another for critiquing purposes, and learn that their own knowledge and experience counts when they read, is referred to as a transactional classroom. A third approach to reading instruction is the social constructivist classroom, where students create the meaning of a text in a social situation where they work collectively and collaboratively through both writing and talking together. The purpose of this study was to pit these three teaching approaches against each other in a grade twelve ELA classroom in order to test their effectiveness in improving the maturity/depth of students' reading comprehension and response to literature. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)