Abstract The aim of the study was to examine the effect of a suggested reader-response based program to teach literature on Al-Azhar first-year secondary school students' attitudes towards literature reading. The study participants consisted of 27 Al-Azhar first-year secondary school female students enrolled in Al-Quseya Institute for Girls, Assuit governorate. The study employed a quasi-experimental one-group pretest-posttest design. The group chosen was initially assessed on literature reading attitude, received instruction in the Reader Response Based Program inspired by Rosenblatt's transactional theory, and was finally assessed again for their literature reading to gauge the difference between the initial and the second measurements. The data collected through the Literature Reading Attitude Scale were analyzed using the Wilcoxon Signed Rank test. Results showed progress in literature reading attitude either for the overall construct or the component subdomains. It is recommended that reading instruction be humanized through fusing the cognitive and affective aspects. More research is needed to study the potential horizons for the reader response in language teaching and learning. There is a need to enlarge the sample to enhance the generalizability of the results.