Geoff Hall

Literature in Language Education

Introduction: Literature as Discourse PART I: LANGUAGE, LITERATURE AND EDUCATION 1. Literary Language and Ordinary Language 2. Reading Literature 3. Literature in Education PART II: EXPLORING RESEARCH IN LANGUAGE, LITERATURE AND EDUCATION 4. Researching Language in Literature 5. Readers Reading Literature 6. Educational Perspectives PART III: RESEARCHING LITERATURE IN LANGUAGE EDUCATION (LLE) 7. Research Methods for LLE 8. Carrying Out Your Own Research Project in Literature in Language Education 9. Guide to Resources for Research in LLE Glossary

Stylistics in Second Language Contexts: A Critical Perspective

This chapter investigates the value of stylistics in educational situations where learners are reading, discussing and re-working texts in an ‘additional’ language (Block 2003: 57), that is, a language which they would not consider their own most fluent communicative resource, and with an aim to better their understanding and uses of the language of the text(s) addressed. Stylistics is nowadays generally contextualized and discourse-based (Verdonk, 2002; Simpson, 2004), focusing on issues of choices of style, register, genre, culture and identities in varying contexts. My understanding of language learning is of ‘appropriation’ or ‘participation’, whereby learners seek, often in difficult cir¬cumstances, to make creative use of the resources or ‘affordances’ previous language uses offer for their own developing communicative purposes (Lantolf, 2000; van Lier, 2004) illustrated by Kramsch (2000), discussed below. What is known of the contribution stylistics might make to the aims of this more widely conceived literary, cultural and general language education, empirically, as opposed to asserted or speculated, as will appear, is rather thin. What we all need to understand better are the possibilities for stylistic interventions in our own classrooms and curricula.

Recent Developments in Uses of Literature in Language Teaching

The preparation of a second edition of a book that has been noticed and used globally gave me a valuable prompt not just to correct earlier mistakes or poorly formulated sentences and sections, but also, more positively, to review activity in an undoubtedly very active field over the last ten years, 2004–2014. My survey in this chapter is necessarily selective and partial, but attempts to identify, with salient examples, some major ongoing developments, with references for readers to follow up for themselves.

The year’s work in stylistics 2003

The field of stylistics continues to charm with its eclectic variety of wild flowers – or frustrate by its lack of co-ordination and clear boundaries, depending on your mood or perspective. On the other hand, cognitivists influenced by more empirical paradigms from psychology are prompting us all to more disciplined methodological principles as they progress and build on each other’s work. This review accordingly follows five headings of Narrative and Discourse; Metaphor and Proverb; Poetry, Play and Translation; Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA); and Variation, to delineate more sociolinguistically oriented and inspired work on variety in use. We conclude with some larger reflections on questions of style and where future research may need to expand its horizons. At the same time it is fully acknowledged that these headings and boundaries are imprecise, overlap and cannot neatly contain all the variety found even in the one year of flourishing publication of 2003. We return to this point also in our Conclusion.

Language in Literature. Stylistics, including Corpus Linguistics. Readability Studies

What do we know of the language of literary texts and what impact has this knowledge had on the uses of literature in education?

Research Methods for LLE, with Examples

This chapter outlines features, and the relative strengths and weaknesses of, the research methods used to study literature in language education, using example studies. Ethnographic and qualitative studies of literature in language education are advocated because of the relative neglect to date of student perspectives on LLE. This chapter therefore proceeds broadly from the more controlled and experimental to more qualitative, ‘naturalistic’ and action research-oriented methods, which are more likely to engage with and be more practical for teachers who have access to relevant situations.

Carrying out Your Own Research Project in LLE

This chapter aims to help readers design and implement their own research project in LLE (literature in language education). The basic orientation assumed is that of Action Research (AR), as outlined at the beginning of Part 3. A teacher-researcher, in the AR perspective, wishes to understand better in order to transform an existing, less than satisfactory situation, in collaboration with other participants, and will then reflect on the effects of the transformation in order to go on improving practices in the interests of all participants. Traditionally, it was said that qualitative research was an orientation, essentially unteachable, learned by experience and apprenticeship only. An advisor, said to have been consulted by a doctoral student about to study native American society somewhere in California, is supposed to have produced the advice at the head of this chapter! Of course there is no substitute for experience, but this is a reason to begin observing, thinking and writing, not to feel disabled and intimidated.

Introduction: Literature as Discourse

This book offers an account of existing research and practice, and aims to stimulate further research and informed pedagogic innovation in the field of literature and language teaching, with special but not exclusive reference to foreign language studies. Colin MacCabe’s pronouncement was no doubt somewhat premature, and more specific: I have pruned ‘English’ and ‘in English’ from either end of the quotation. Jacques Derrida deliberately overstates the case too. Nevertheless, this book in its present form has been made possible by the historical dominance and later removal of English Literature from its privileged central educational position in favour of a more open and relativistic, linguistically inspired image of writing(s), a ‘plurality of writings’ (MacCabe 1984), a movement in which MacCabe himself featured notoriously in 1983, before — prefiguring one argument of this book — moving from literature into cultural studies as Director of the British Film Institute. Such a move was prepared by Derrida and others, taking various linguistic perspectives on text, ‘literary’ or otherwise, the educational implications of which are still being elaborated here and elsewhere. The key development was to see literary text as best studied against the background of other texts, and all texts as socially situated. Thus ‘Literature into cultural studies’ arguments are central to reviews of the field offered by Easthope 1991 (viewed more positively) and Bergonzi 1990 (more negatively).

Book Review: Language in Literature. An Introduction to Stylistics

that the reader needs to have or, indeed, is able to have all these contexts in some state of activation in his or her consciousness. This would suggest that the complete current text model would always be available for access, whereas it is just as likely that it is (re)constructed according to the needs of online processing. Narrative discourse does not have to equal narrative comprehension. Chapter 8 develops another aspect of the mental model approach and capitalizes on the distinction between framed and unframed text. Contextual frames involve specific settings and hence provide a baseline for distinguishing between types of text in narrative. General statements in a narrative text, of a descriptive or argumentative kind, are not framed and form stretches of a different type of discourse within the story. Consequences for reference assignment and possibilities for the classification of non-narrative discourse are pointed out at the end of the chapter. The book ends by presenting a summary of the research and pointing out some directions for future work in linguistics and psychology. It returns to the theme of closing the gap between the two disciplines in the hope that the book has been a contribution to this effort. Despite my reservations, I believe that it certainly has and can heartily recommend it to researchers from both traditions. Gerard Steen Tilburg University, The Netherlands

Discourse and Literature: The Interplay of Form and Mind: by Guy Cook, 1994, Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp. 285, ISBN 0 19 437185 9 (pb)

of stamp collecting’ (p. 384). The Language Instinct should appeal to anyone with an interest in language. For those with a more specific interest in style, it has little of direct relevance to offer. The only explicit references concern the way in which the study of natural language processing should help to explain stylistic intuitions about awkwardness of style. Certain ways in which sentences are constructed cause undue extra processing effort. One of the main themes of the book, however, and the theme that is emphasised in the final chapter, does have a bearing on the way in which the study of style might be approached. This theme is the challenge that linguistic theory presents to what Pinker calls