Despite the fact that students are an important component of the educational process, their preferences for instruction are not typically a consideration for classroom practices. The purpose of this survey study was to determine high school students' preferences for methods used in the instruction of literary works of art. Students expressed preferences for instructional methods that promoted either aesthetic or efferent stances as explained in Louise Rosenblatt's transactional theory. In addition, this study explored students' reasons for preferences and examined correlations between gender, reading concepts, reading attitudes, and students' preferences for instructional methods. Students preferred the instructional method that promoted an aesthetic stance (60.72 %) which using a chi-square nonparametric test were statistically significant ?(superscript 2) (1, n = 84) = 3.857, p[underlined] = 0.05.