Vol. 2:2 (2020) ► pp.209–240
Guiding towards register awareness in an undergraduate EFL curriculum in Italy
The special case of verbal art [1] 1
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.
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
- 4.1A sample 3rd year SSS+ workshop
- 5.Discussion and parting thoughts
- Acknowledgements
- Notes
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References
https://doi.org/10.1075/rs.19003.mil