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Using Foregrounding Theory as a Teaching Methodology in a Stylistics Course
Sonia Zyngier and Tania M. G. Shepherd
What is
Literature, Really? A Corpus-Driven Study of Students’ Statements
Mick Short and Dawn Archer
Designing a Worldwide
Web-Based Stylistics Course and Investigating it’s Effectiveness
Brett Zimmerman
Teaching
Melville and Style: A Catalogue of Selected Rhetorical Devices
Lesley Jeffries
Analogy and Multi-modal
Exploration in the Teaching of Language Theory
John Tinker
Vagrant
Sympathies: From Stylistic Analysis to a Pedagogy of Style
Melina Bär
Checklist
of American and British Programs in Stylistics and Literary Linguistics
John V. Knapp
Talking
the Walk in Cognitive Stylistics
In this article I suggest that foregrounding theory, arguably the cornerstone of stylistics, might be employed not only in the analysis of texts, but also as a methodology in teaching stylistic analysis. I propose that effective and memorable lectures can be produced by deviating from the supposed prototypical lecture format, and that it is the resultant foregrounding effect that helps to give the lecture its memorable qualities. In order to demonstrate how this might work I draw upon my own experiences of lecturing on a first year undergraduate course in stylistics (LING 131 Language and Style). I discuss the reasoning behind the teaching methods used on the course as a means of showing how foregrounding elements of a lecture might result in a more effective learning experience for students. I also explain how the effectiveness of LING 131 is due to its unique presentation of foregrounding via foregrounding.
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Sonia
Zyngier and Tania M. G. Shepherd. “What is Literature,
Really? A Corpus-Driven Study of Students’ Statements”
The purpose of the present study is to map the attitude of first-year
university undergraduates regarding their conceptualization of literature.
To this end, we resort to the analytical tools defined by Martin and Martin
and Rose, which describe the language of appraisal in English from a systemic
functional perspective. In order to establish a profile of students’
patterns of appraisal, a mini learner corpus of student essays was first
collected and subsequently digitized. The analysis was carried out
by means of the computer software WordSmith Tools. This software
extracted concordance lines displaying the word literature in the node
position. Each concordance line was then manually labeled according
to the analytical categories chosen for the present research. The
distribution of the various categories in the students’ texts suggests
a utilitarian rather than an emotional stance towards literature.
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Mick Short
and Dawn Archer. “Designing a Worldwide Web-Based Stylistics Course
and Investigating it’s Effectiveness”
This article describes an interactive, “all singing and dancing” web-based
version of an introductory stylistics course under development at Lancaster
University, UK, as well as an educational experiment in which it will be
used. The web-based course is an electronic version of an existing
lecture-seminar course that is designed to be interactive and fun, and
also contains an innovative self-assessment mechanism which enables first-year
students to practise stylistic analysis before submitting their coursework
assessment at the end of the course. The educational experiment involves
using the two different teaching modes to deliver the course to parallel
student groups, and comparing student reactions. Colleagues in other
universities are invited to join in the experiment, using students in their
own departments.
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Brett
Zimmerman. “Teaching Melville and Style: A Catalogue of Selected
Rhetorical Devices”
In 1995, with Melville our case study, I wanted to impress upon my
senior English majors that style as well as theme is important in the literary
productions of acknowledged masters. My pedagogical introduction
to stylistics would draw mostly upon the tropes and schemes of ancient
Greek and Roman rhetors. To increase my students’ sensitivity to
Melville’s language, then, I distributed an alphabetical catalogue of rhetorical
devices with definitions and exemplifications from his oeuvre—with mini-essays.
This catalogue supports Gail Coffler’s assertion that Melville was “an
expert stylist” whose phrasing shows a clear understanding and intuitive
mastery of classic principles.
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Lesley Jeffries.
“Analogy and Multi-modal Exploration in the Teaching of Language Theory”
This article reports on an experiment in teaching at Huddersfield University
(UK) in the context of the first year of a single honors English Language
degree program. It took as its basic premise the idea that some kinds
of learning of theory would be aided by the use of analogy explored by
multi-modal means rather than the purely textual or discoursal. This
article combines the insights of research into analogical thinking and
into multimodal cognition to suggest that analogical experimentation using
exploratory methods with non-linguistic modes of representation may be
able to help students in understanding and learning complex theoretical
concepts.
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John
Tinker. “Vagrant Sympathies: From Stylistic Analysis to a Pedagogy
of Style”
Several recent literary studies argue that style in language is an
essential element in the formation of subcultures and subjectivities.
This article examines two of these studies and asks what their methods
and findings suggest about the teaching of style in composition and rhetoric
classes. If style is instrumental to the coherence of localized cultures
and to individuals’ understanding of themselves in language, as these literary
studies suggest, an effective writing pedagogy will teach students to question
the stylistic expectations of academic discourses, to respond to these
expectations with a strategic balance of compliance and resistance, and
to develop a large palette of stylistic options in order to understand
how this feature of language shapes point of view. The article concludes
with questions about how new writing technologies may require us to think
about style.
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Melina
Bär. “Checklist of American and British Programs in Stylistics
and Literary Linguistics”
The list of programs provided is meant to expedite the sometimes difficult
process of finding a university at which to study stylistics or literary
linguistics in the United States and the United Kingdom. Most information
is available online at the provided homepages or was generously supplied
by the programs’ directors.
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John
V. Knapp. “Talking the Walk in Cognitive Stylistics”
Jonathan Culpeper has made a significant contribution to the study
of literary character in drama by blending some basic characterological
assumptions with what has come to be known as cognitive stylistics.
Culpeper asks three very large questions: (1.) How does the reader’s prior
knowledge contribute to characterization? (2.) How does the reader
infer characteristics from the text? (3.) What are the textual cues
in characterization? After a general discussion of what he calls
“the process of character formation,” Culpeper examines earlier scholarship
in text comprehension, work done largely in German, followed by his own
“general model for characterization.” He then surveys character categories
in previous literary criticism, followed by chapters analyzing the roles
of “top-down” and “bottom-up” processing in inferring character from texts
and textual cues in characterization. Culpeper concludes his study
with brief mentions of the play, The Entertainer and the film, Scent of
a Woman, and follows up with a lengthier study of Shakespeare’s Taming
of the Shrew to illustrate the insights derived from his cognitive and
linguistic labors.
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