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

Abstract

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.

Language-literature integration in high-school EFL education: investigating students’ perspectives

“…Mentioned only eight times in six reflective accounts, some resented the fact that they were already familiar with iconicity. This criticism appears in Viana and Zyngier (2017) and Zyngier and Viana (2016) and must be interpreted alongside the students' proficiency levels as their command of English varied dramatically. This reveals the difficulty of teaching a mixed-ability class, a context which 'deserve[s] far greater professional attention in ELT' (Hedge 2000, 25).…”

“…reflective [Type here] accounts) and references per subcategory, value and category. Moving away from pedagogical stylistics(Viana and Zyngier 2017), this study examines the data with a view to providing a fine-grained analysis of perceived learning/teaching gains and losses.Table 2. Number of sources and references.…”

Creative writing and iconicity in English as a foreign language

“…Our previous studies indicated that the participants viewed the experience as pedagogically valid (cf. Viana and Zyngier 2017;Zyngier and Viana 2016). Here, we provided evidence that they also learned how to work with iconicity and found room to express themselves.…”

Stylistics goes to school

“…Pedagogical stylistics has been the focus of a number of scholars (e.g. Burke, 2010; Carter, 1989; Clark and Zyngier, 2003; Giovanelli, 2010, 2016b, 2017; Short 1996; Viana and Zyngier, 2017; Widdowson, 1975; Zyngier, 2006; Zyngier and Fialho, 2010, 2015; Zyngier and Viana, 2016, amongst others) and the special-interest group of the Poetics and Linguistics Association (PEDSIG). Whilst many studies have discussed the aims and processes of pedagogical stylistics in a university context (e.g.…”