This essay suggests a foreign language (FL) pedagogy for teaching literature to beginning students that creates strong readers equipped with strategies to undertake independent interpretations of literary works. It endorses a top-down processing that teaches students to attend to patterns of textual messages. Students use an "r+1" approach (the "r" component assumes a reading process that reconstructs the macropatterns of a text out of recognizable details, and the "1" component is reflected in the discovery process that this reconstruction involves). Students learn to reconstruct macropatterns through a discovery process that explicitly encourages them to try out their own hypotheses. In this discovery process, which involves language exercises that are in textual context, the teacher serves as a guide rather than an expert. The paper emphasizes that there are no right answers, just processes of reading. It shows how students can learn to consider objectively the space between what a text says and what a reader perceives it to say. It asserts that using this approach makes novice readers aware of the possible discrepancies between their expectations and the information in a literary text, thereby integrating literary study into language acquisition. (Contains 25 references.) (SM)