Chapter 14. Literary awareness in a high-school EFL learning environment

Language and Literature

2017

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The growing number of recent publications on pedagogical stylistics indicates that this area is still of much interest to those who invest in the integration of language and literature. However, evidencebased assessments of pedagogical stylistics are still few and depend mostly on teachers' intuitions. The present study contributes towards filling this gap by examining 28 reflective accounts produced by highschool English as a foreign language (EFL) teenagers who participated in a literary awareness workshop on iconicity. Branching out from pedagogical stylistics, literary awareness is here described as a program which aims at sensitizing students to verbal artistry. The bottom-up analysis of the participants' accounts reveals five main aspects -"applicability," "learning," "materials," "students" and "teaching" -and indicates that the workshop was to a certain degree transformative. Instead of an instrumental approach to language learning, the workshop aimed mostly at consciousness-raising. Students' assessment of the workshop was quite positive, and they linked in-class experience with their lives outside the school. The results indicate that, besides learning a foreign language, the process of reflection has led students beyond the text. We conclude by discussing the implications of the workshop for both pedagogy and research. KeywordsPedagogical stylistics, literary awareness, critical pedagogy, English language teaching and learning, English as a foreign language, high school, student appraisal, empirical approach IntroductionSince Jakobson (1960) called for the integration of linguistics and poetics, several stylisticians have worked towards combining his theoretical postulations with classroom applications (e.g.

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Exploring new territories in pedagogical stylistics: An investigation of high-school EFL students’ assessments

Viana¹,

Language and Literature

2017

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Considerations on the Use of Translated Poems in EFL Settings

Chesnokova

Pedagogical Stylistics in the 21st Century

2022

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To this point few empirical studies have examined the reactions of students when translated poems are used in EFL literature classrooms. In a previous study (Chesnokova et al., 2017), we noticed that opting for translations comes with a price, and reactions will vary. In this chapter, we offer a detailed line-by-line analysis of Poe's ‗The Lake' translated into three different languages so as to check whether these differences may be attributed to the translators' choices. Thus versions from renowned translators are selected and compared with the original poem by means of stylistic analysis. The results are then checked against reactions of 500 students of Language and Literature. This chapter argues that each translation indeed creates a singular context that may account for the differences. We conclude that teachers of literature should be made aware that the unique context the translators' stylistic options create may strongly impact upon students' reading experiences.

Creative writing and iconicity in English as a foreign language

Viana

2018

New Writing

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Creative writing workshops in high-school English-as-a-foreign-language education have had little attention from researchers so far. Addressing this gap, this paper investigates the creative production of Brazilian high-school students after a workshop unit on iconicity. Their iconic poems are analysed visually, thematically and stylistically. Despite variation in students' self-identified language proficiency, the results show that the poems presented visual and thematic diversity. The stylistic analysis evidenced the richness of students' creations notwithstanding their lack of English proficiency. Although some surface language infelicities are identified, these do not limit their expression. Overall, the findings reveal that iconicity was not only an appropriate topic for these students, but it also proved to be a genuine way by means of which they could freely express their individuality, breaking away with conventions, reflecting on a variety of matters, and registering their observation of the world and of themselves.