Beatrix Busse

E-learning and Language and Style in Mainz and Münster

This article reports on how online Language and Style was implemented and taught simultaneously and cooperatively at two German universities in the summer semester of 2004, in the English departments of the universities of Mainz (Patricia Plummer) and Münster (Beatrix Busse). In order to compare different learning and teaching styles, one-third of the course was taught in a traditional seminar-style mode while two-thirds consisted of online workshops. The authors cooperated extensively during the project, assessing and evaluating students’ responses and performances both quantitatively and qualitatively. This article focuses on (1) the place of e-learning and stylistics in our departments and in English studies in Germany in general, (2) the challenges that had to be faced prior to the implementation of the course, (3) how we put the course into practice in our teaching environments, (4) our students’ responses to, and performance on, Language and Style and (5) our own experiences in running a web-based course. Finally, we draw some general conclusions about web-based learning and teaching and what we have gained from participating in Mick Shorts investigation.

Investigating Student Reactions to a Web-Based Stylistics Course in Different National and Educational Settings

Although native English-speaking teachers of literature in English have sometimes shown a theoretical interest in the pedagogy of literature teaching, by and large they have tended to assume that an interest in their subject and associated texts, and a generally humane and humanist approach to discussing texts and issues, is more or less all that is required. Teachers of stylistics like to be involved in such discussion with their students too, but they have also been interested in the ‘nuts and bolts’ of teaching stylistics, and language and literature more generally. This is partly because stylisticians are predisposed to be interested in the more minute details of whatever they are investigating, and partly because having a foot in the linguistics/English language camp as well as the literature camp means that they have had to work harder to interest students in their area of study. By and large, nativespeaking students of English literature love reading and talking about literature, but are less keen to study the language of literary texts in the systematic, analytical and precise detail that stylistics requires, and so the stylisticians have been forced to think harder about how to engage their students with what they teach.

The web-based Language and Style course, e-learning and stylistics

This special issue of Language and Literature describes an introductory, interactive, online, (mainly) literary stylistics course, which is available free of charge, and how it has been used in a number of investigations to explore student reactions to learning online how to do stylistic analysis. Web-based Language and Style is an electronic equivalent of a course which has run, in various incarnations, at Lancaster University, UK since the 1980s. It used to be available as part of the Part I (first-year) English offerings and is now available as part of the Part I English Language offerings, under the course mnemonic ‘Ling 131’. Online Language and Style was made freely available in July 2005 at the Poetics and Linguistics Association (PALA) conference at the University of Huddersfield, UK, to mark the 25th anniversary of the founding of PALA and to help those wanting to learn or teach stylistic analysis worldwide. It can be found at: http://www.lancs.ac.uk/fass/projects/stylistics/start.htm. Section 2 of this preface describes the structure of the rest of this special issue. Section 3 outlines the nature of the web-based course, how it came to be created and how, in general terms, it has been used for investigative pedagogical purposes. Section 4 describes the course in more detail and relates its structure and philosophy to what has been said more generally about e-learning. Section 5 compares Language and Style with other internet stylistics offerings and other internet courses more generally. Section 6 outlines how other stylistics teachers can use Language and Style in their own pedagogical research, and the support we can offer to those interested in such research. We also provide as an appendix a checklist of things which need to be considered by teachers thinking of using online Language and Style.

A celebration of words and ideas: The stylistic potential of the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English DictionaryKayChristianRobertsJaneSamuelsMichaelWotherspoonIrené (eds), Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary, Oxford University Press: Oxford, 2009; 3952 pp.: ISBN 9780199208999, £275.00/

The kind of text I am concerned with here could have been called hereword (a1100), price (1225), say-well (1362), laud (1384), lof-word (1390), commendation (1393) or precony (1430) in the Middle English period, and laudation (1500), prick and praise (1534), applause (1600), extolment (1604) or eulogy (1725) before, in and after Shakespeare’s time. Today, one’s admiration for an excellent piece of work would probably be expressed – more colloquially – by such adjective combinations as Tiffany-Style design, mega quality, or kicking excitement. As representatives of the semantic concept of praise these words have been retrieved by simply browsing the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary (HTOED) and are also apt ways of characterizing the outstanding quality of this monumental work, which was awarded the prestigious National Library of Scotland/Saltire Society Research Book of the Year Award. In what follows it will become clear that I am another ardent fan of this excellent piece of dedicated philological and linguistic scholarship. The HTOED might well be one of the last great reference works available in printed format, which is indispensable for an informed (linguistic) investigation of any (English) language product – historical or contemporary. But I am getting ahead of myself. Let me first outline some facts about the HTOED before I describe its potential for and points of intersection with stylistic research. The project started in 1965 when Michael Samuels presented to the Philological Society his plans for a historical thesaurus. Under the guidance of extraordinary scholars