The teaching-questioning strategy developed in this paper, based on reader-response criticism and Kenneth Burke's pentad, can be used by teachers to elicit responses to any literary work and is designed to help students participate in a work's dramatic context, discover meaning as they read, and assure that their critical essays are based on an appreciation of the internal structures of a literary work. An explanation of Burke's pentad shows that every act of communication contains an agent who acts through language, an agency enabling the agent to act, a scene in which the verbal action takes place, an action that can be abstracted from the overall situation and represented as an event, and a purpose guiding the developing verbal action from beginning to end. Following this explanation, other sections of the paper illustrate the application of the strategy to Robert Frost's "Mending Wall." One section notes that teachers must analyze the work to find which of the five elements are most important and to pinpoint where each dominates the act of reading. Another section offers a set of directions, response-questions, and writing exercises that will help teachers bring students to an understanding of reading as an active process in which meaning evolves from give and take among perspectives. Concluding sections of the paper provide examples of ways teachers can build subjective and objective responses to "Mending Wall." (RL)