Marcello Giovanelli

Becoming an English Language Teacher: Linguistic Knowledge, Anxieties and the Shifting Sense of Identity.

English language is a fast-growing and popular subject at A level, but the majority of qualified secondary teachers in the UK have subject expertise and backgrounds in literature. This paper reports on interviews with seven secondary English teachers who discuss the strategies they used when taking on the responsibility of A-level English language teaching for the first time. It highlights the shifting sense of identity that these teachers felt they went through, and as such, explores some emerging issues related to identity from a narrative/personal history perspective. The study reveals that despite feelings of anxiety and low self-confidence, teachers felt that the experience had been a positive one in terms of their own developing identity as an English teacher and had impacted on other aspects of their teaching. The paper raises questions about the value of language-based work for English teachers and has implications for UK initial and continuing teacher education in English.

Pedagogical stylistics:a text world theory approach to the teaching of poetry

Abstract This article explores how the stylistic framework of Text World Theory (Werth 1999, Gavins 2007) can be used in the classroom to generate critical insights and analyses of the ways in which texts operate. This approach falls within the scope of the discipline of pedagogical stylistics and as such it will examine and consider its usefulness as a teaching model to encourage both student awareness of language and wider consideration and understanding of the interaction between readers and texts, including intertextuality and the positioning of the text in its socio‐historical context.

'What do you think?’ Let me tell you:discourse about texts and the literature classroom

Abstract This article examines the practice of studying texts in secondary school English lessons as a particular type of reading experience. Through a critical stylistic analysis of a popular edition of John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, the article explores how reading the text is framed by educational editions, and how this might present the purpose of studying fiction to students. The article draws on two cognitive linguistic concepts – figure/ground configuration and narrative schemas – in order to explore how ‘discourse about a text’ can potentially influence how students read and engage with a text. Building on a previous article, the notion of pre-figuring is developed to offer an account of how a reader’s attention can be directed to particular elements of a text, thus privileging some interpretations and downplaying others. The article then reflects more widely on the perceived purposes of studying fiction with young people, exploring in particular the recent rise of support within the profession in England for Hirsch’s ‘cultural literacy’ model, which sees knowledge about texts as more valuable than authentic reading and personal response.

Reading, Readers and English

There is a long-standing tradition of reader response theories connected to debate and discussion in English education. Although largely theory-driven, early work in the field (e.g. Richards 1929; Rosenblatt 1978) sought to integrate the literary and the educational in a practical context-driven concern with the relationship between the reader and a text. Alongside later manifestations, these reader response theories have influenced the practice of generations of English teachers by drawing attention to the importance of understanding the processes by which students, both individually and as part of a larger social network, make meaning in the classroom. The concept of “the reader” remains central to curriculum documentation, where enjoyment is foregrounded as valuable (DfE 2013), and to practitioners who have championed the “personal growth” model (DES/WO 1989) of teaching that associates literary fiction in developing individual imaginative, linguistic and social skills (Goodwyn 2016). Within the field of literary studies more generally, the movement away from mid-twentiethcentury New Criticism and its text-centric practices has led to a more concentrated focus on the plurality of meaning and the various sites of interaction in which readers come together to interpret literature. In reader-oriented work, the reader is viewed as an active participant in the interpretative process, drawing on and shaping different forms of knowledge that can be shared and developed in further interpretations. This reconfigured understanding of interpretation from fixed and singular to fluid and multiple has galvanised researchers to shift their focus from the theoretical to the empirical in recent years, a movement reflected across a range of disciplines interested in the nature of readers and reading. This special issue offers a snapshot of empirically oriented, cutting-edge work being undertaken that advances our understanding of just how readings are negotiated, legitimised or undermined in various educational spaces. The articles in this issue variously examine the influence of teachers, peers, culture and the learning environment itself on readers’ responses, drawing on various theoretical stances and methodologies concerned with how texts are framed and experienced in the classroom context. Each therefore specifically showcases research that addresses, discusses and exemplifies ways in which we might engage with Rosenblatt’s notion of the “dynamic situation”. Acknowledgement and scrutiny of the relationship between text and reader (student or teacher) is important and, we feel, current, due to the continuing performativity agenda in schools, the recent influence in classrooms in England, and elsewhere, of more transmissive pedagogies of literature teaching (see Mason and Giovanelli 2017 for discussion), and the associated issues of authority and discursive rights in the classroom when literary texts are discussed (Xerri 2013).

“We Have Tomorrow Bright Before Us Like a Flame”: Pronouns, Enactors, and Cross-Writing in The Dream Keeper and Other Poems

Langston Hughes (1902–1967) was a renowned and celebrated twentieth-century African-American poet who contributed significant literary outputs in the cultural movement known as the Harlem Renaissance and also published poems for children. This chapter draws on Text World Theory to explore Hughes’ use of first-person pronouns in two poems from The Dream Keeper. In doing so, it demonstrates how the potential for ambiguous, dual referents is an important stylistic feature of Hughes’ presentation of childhood and children in poetry that is aimed at both adult and child audiences.

’Something happened, something bad’: Blackouts, uncertainties and event construal in The Girl on the Train

This article examines the representation of mind style in Paula Hawkins’ (2015) best-selling novel The Girl on the Train. It examines how Hawkins presents the fictional mind of Rachel, a character who is affected by anterograde amnesia as a result of alcoholic blackouts. Rachel’s narrative voice drives the novel, and its retelling of events is characterised by her inability to recall important information related to the night that a young woman disappeared and was murdered. This article specifically draws on the Cognitive Grammar notion of construal to explore the presentation of Rachel’s mind style and its affordances and limitations. In doing so, it builds on developing scholarship that has identified the potential for Cognitive Grammar to provide a richly nuanced account of the representation of a fictional mind. The analysis specifically examines two ways in which event construal is presented: nominal grounding strategies and reference point relationships. For the latter, the article also develops emerging work that has sought to make a connection between Cognitive Grammar and Text World Theory in terms of how mental representations are projected by the text.

Watching TV with a linguist

Barker, M., and K. Brooks. 1998. Knowing Audiences: Judge Dredd, its Friends, Fans and Foes. Luton: University of Luton Press. Barton, D., and M. Hamilton. 1998. Local Literacies: Reading and Writing in One Community. London: Routledge. Carrington, V., and J. Marsh. 2005. “Digital Childhood and Youth: New Texts, New Literacies.” Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education 26 (3): 279–285. Street, B. 1995. Social Literacies. London: Longman.

The Discourse of Reading Groups: Integrating Cognitive and Sociocultural Perspectives David Peplow, Joan Swann, Paola Trimarco and Sara Whiteley Routledge (2016) ISBN 78‐0415729697 £95.00 hardback

The Discourse of Reading Groups: Integrating Cognitive and Sociocultural Perspectives is an innovative and very readable book which aims to bring together methodologies and insights from cognitive linguistics/stylistics, reader response theory, interactional linguistics and the sociology of reading to provide an account of the ways people read in group scenarios. It is particularly concerned with exploring how what participants say about their reading sheds light on interpretative and identity-performing processes. The book draws on a number of research projects that the authors have been involved in, examining reading group data from a variety of settings including members’ houses, bookshops and other public spaces, institutions (e.g. schools, prisons, workplaces) and various online forums. The focus throughout is on the joint, collaborative nature of the reading experience that marks reading within a group as distinctive from solitary reading; the authors’ argument is therefore that the reading groups is a particularly interesting site of study for the academic researcher. The challenge set out in the book is to draw together cognitive and sociocultural perspectives, which the authors say have until now been seen as incompatible approaches, into a coherent and plausible account of such reading experiences, and an attractive and robust methodology for the exploration of discourse.

Activating metaphors: Exploring the embodied nature of metaphorical mapping in political discourse

Courses: Persuasion, Rhetoric, Communication Theory, Metaphor Theory, Multimodal Communication. Objectives: This activity allows students to explore the embodied nature of metaphor and its interpretative significance by using gesture and physical movement. Students also understand how, in metaphor, abstract entities are conceptualized in terms of something more concrete.

Conceptual proximity and the experience of war in Siegfried Sassoon’s ‘A Working Party'

This chapter looks at the specific linguistic choices made by the producer of literary language; how he has chosen to represent the narrative, and the effects elicited by these choices. As Langacker’s (2008a) Cognitive Grammar model lacks a specific counterpart for linguistic gapping, this analysis applies the CG notion of profiling alongside Talmy’s (2000) theory of the windowing of attention to David Foster Wallace’s short story ‘The Soul Is Not a Smithy’, which appeared in his short story collection Oblivion (Wallace 2004: 67–113). ‘The Soul Is Not a Smithy’ is primarily concerned with the windowing of attention – often quite literally. The story focuses on an unnamed narrator, who recounts a traumatic event from his childhood. The event in question was a ‘hostage situation’ at comprehensive school, which involved a substitute teacher (Mr Johnson) experiencing a mental breakdown which caused him to write ‘KILL THEM’ (Wallace 2004: 87) repeatedly on the board. However, the narrator’s account describes in greater specificity the daydream he was having at the time, which was centred on a blind girl Ruth, her dog Cuffie, and her life with her family. The story concludes by describing through a newspaper account how Mr Johnson was shot by police troops, and finally finishes by outlining the fact that, ultimately, the narrator wanted to recount his relationship with his father, and his fear of entering the workplace as an adult.Santanu Das (2007) has argued that the defining characteristics of first-world war poetry are the stark movement away from epic forms, and the refashioning of verse as a type of ‘missive from the trenches’, both of which shift the perspective of the reading experience from distance to proximity. In this chapter, I offer a way of explaining this interpretation both generally, and specifically through analysing Siegfried Sassoon’s (1917) ‘A Working Party’. My analysis focuses on the distribution of complex temporal and atemporal profiles, the texture afforded by reference point relationships and the subsequent authorial manipulation and control over dominions, and the point-of view effects associated with pronoun use. I suggest that paying close attention to these can explain a reading experience that illuminates at close-hand the horrific intimacy of the trench.