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Article published In:
Register Studies
Vol. 2:2 (2020) ► pp.209–240

Guiding towards register awareness in an undergraduate EFL curriculum in Italy

The special case of verbal art

ORCID logo | University of Bologna
ORCID logo | University of Bologna
This contribution adds to ever-growing research on ‘pedagogical stylistics’, (e.g., Burke et al. 2012). We present a case study describing a register approach to teaching literature, or verbal art (Hasan 1985/1989), to undergraduate EFL students in a Systemic Functional Grammar (FG)-based perspective (Halliday & Matthiessen 2004). Our research is guided by two main goals: enhancing the students’ sensitivity to the peculiar functions of language in literature, as part of a wider curriculum on teaching register awareness, and setting up good practices to monitor and assess the effectiveness of our approach. Thus, we present a set of activities based on Hasan’s (1985/1989, 2007) framework for the analysis of verbal art as a ‘special’ register, which is rooted in FG. We then discuss quantitative and qualitative data related to student perceptions of our pedagogical approach, gathered through specifically designed questionnaires, which were followed by semi-structured interviews when possible. The data illustrate the largely positive impact of the approach on students’ engagement, though not unequivocally: problematic issues and implications for future research are also discussed.
Keywords: Pedagogical stylistics, verbal art, Systemic Functional Grammar, Systemic Socio-Semantic Stylistics, Pervasive Parallelism, student feedback
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Bringing FG-based pedagogical stylistics into the classroom: Context and methods
    • 2.1Our take on linguistics
    • 2.2Our stakeholders
    • 2.3What we do and how we do it
  • 3.Additional relevant theory and research
    • 3.1More on stylistics and its pedagogy
    • 3.2Our pedagogical model of verbal art: A brief overview of Systemic Socio-Semantic Stylistics (SSS)
    • 3.3The (very condensed) case for slotting Jakobson into SSS
  • 4.Teaching a register unlike any other: SSS+ as pedagogical stylistics
    • 4.1A sample 3rd year SSS+ workshop
      • 4.1.1The text
      • 4.1.2Class work
    • 4.2Monitoring our practices
      • Likability
      • Utility
      • Difficulty
      • Model validity
    • 4.3Post-incongruous data action research
      • 4.3.1Discovery interviews
  • 5.Discussion and parting thoughts
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 6 November 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/rs.19003.mil
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