Louise Rosenblatt developed her transactional theory based on the idea that everyone brings a unique experience to the reading table. You have individuals that have prior background knowledge on certain things that other students may not have. For example, if you are reading a book about farming and one boy has a family that farms and the other one doesn't, the one that has the...
Most knowledge about it and will make the most connection will be the one that is around farming all the time. Therefore, she emphasized the connections made between the text and the reader. She made it more of a transaction or an interaction with what was being read. This serves to improve comprehension. She emphasized two different types of responses to literature and text.
When you have informational text being read, you are going to have more of an efferent response, meaning more fact-based because of the nature of the information being presented. When you have literature being read, you will have more of an aesthetic response to it, meaning that you can make a connection. based on your emotions or feelings. She also emphasized three ways to connect to a text. You can emphasize that you can connect text to self, meaning that something you can relate to in your own life.
Text to text, if you've read another story that's close to the content of what you're reading now, you will have more prior knowledge. And text to world, if you understand what... is happening in the world in certain situations you can relate to that.
Anything that you can serve to connect yourself as a reader to the text will help you when you are trying to remember what was read. This transactional theory also called a reading response theory is constructivist in nature because it emphasizes the active role that the reader has in making meaning.