Language, Literature and the Learner

Creative Classroom Practice

Ronald Carter, John Mcrae

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317886600
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Language, Literature and the Learner is an edited volume evolving from three international seminars devoted to the teaching of literature in a second or foreign language. The seminars explicitly addressed the interface between language and literature teaching to investigate the ways in which literature can be used as a resource for language growth at secondary, intermediate and upper-intermediate level.This book presents the reader with a practical classroom-based guide to how the teaching of language and literature, until recently seen as two distinct subjects within the English curriculum, can be used as mutually supportive resources within the classroom. Through essays and case studies it reports on the most recent developments in classroom practice and methodology and suggests ways in which the curriculum could be reshaped to take advantage of this integrated approach.The text will be essential reading for students undertaking PGCE, TESOL/MA, UCLES, CTEFLA, RSA and Teachers' Diploma courses worldwide. Students of applied linguistics, those on stylistics courses and undergraduates studying English language will welcome it as accessible supplementary reading.

1

Look both ways before crossing: developments in the language and literature classroom

RONALD CARTER

Ronald Carter argues in this paper that creativity is pervasive in language use: in idioms and everyday metaphor; in jokes; in advertising and newspaper headlines; and in the highly patterned instances of canonical literary texts. This paper illustrates and analyses such use and suggests that language learners should be given greater opportunities to experience, interpret and use language in its more creative aspects.

Such approaches require pedagogies which are more process-based and which involve greater language awareness on the part of teachers and learners. Such language awareness can also be a point of entry for learners into cultural awareness, both with a small ‘c’ and a large ‘C’. It can be an essential prerequisite for the development of literature teaching in and through English. Issues for theoretical consideration are debated in the paper and there is an extensively worked-out classroom-based illustration. Both theoretical and practical issues are explored in relation to a review of recent developments in the field, and the paper is therefore usefully positioned as the first in this volume.

1.1 Looking back

The past ten years or so of activity in the field of literature teaching in ELT have witnessed some clear trends and tendencies. The past five years have witnessed a veritable explosion of publications – books, journal articles, teaching materials – as well as a high proportion of conferences, colloquia, and seminars devoted to the teaching of literature. The majority of activities have been at the interface of language and literature teaching. Indeed, if one main trend is to be discerned, it is that of a shift of balance. The balance has moved away from the teaching of literature per se and towards the teaching of literature at the interface with language teaching. Likewise, discussion of the kinds of text used in the EFL/ESL classroom now only rarely takes place without reference to literary texts and to how they might be integrated with more familiar language teaching materials.

1.2 Language-based approaches

In the early 1980s language-based approaches tended to be almost indistinguishable from stylistics. The place of stylistics in ELT as a distinct activity will be explored subsequently, but from the mid-1980s – with the publication of McRae and Boardman’s Reading Between the Lines (1984) – language-based approaches became more distinctive and definitive in their own right. Language-based approaches are essentially integrative. They seek to integrate language and literature study. They also offer approaches to literary texts which are accessible not just to more advanced students but to a wider range of students, from lower to upper intermediate levels.

Here is a concrete example of language-based approaches:

Students are given a sentence. They are told that the sentence is a complete poem and, working in pairs or small groups, that they have to re-construct this sentence as a poem. They must also give particular attention to the relationship between form and meaning; in other words, the way the words are disposed on the page should be connected with the subject matter or theme (s) encoded by the sentence.

40 – Love

middle aged couple playing tennis when the game ends and they go home the net will still be between them.

At an appropriate point students are then introduced to the text as written by the contemporary British poet, Roger McGough.

40 –	LOVE
middle	aged
couple	playing
ten	nis
when	the
game	ends
and	they
go	home
the	net
will	still
be	be
tween	them

What principles and what particular pedagogic strategies are exemplified by this example of a language-based approach to this poem? Two main principles can be isolated:

1. Activity-principle

Students actively participate in making the poem mean. They do not simply respond to an already complete artefact; they are involved in its construction. It is not simply a finished product, a given for them to react to. It is presented as a process.

2. Process-principle

Students are more likely to appreciate and understand texts if they experience them directly as part of a process of meaning-creation. Strategies such as this exercise in re-writing also place the responsibility for meaning-making on the students, usually working in pairs or in a small group. Interpretation becomes their own, as much the student’s property as the teacher’s, though the teacher’s role in assisting such processes obviously has to be active and purposeful.

This is, then, what is generally understood when it is said that language-based approaches are student-centred, activity-based and process-oriented.

Strategies such as those of re-writing are, of course, not especially original (see Pope 1995). Language-based approaches involve numerous techniques and procedures which are familiar, even over familiar, in teaching English as a foreign language. They include: prediction exercises; cloze exercises; ranking tasks; active comprehension techniques; producing and acting out the text and so on. These techniques are tried and tested and do have the advantage of being familiar to teachers even though they are normally suitably modified, particularly in the case of poetry, to bring out characteristics which are peculiar to literary texts. Language-based approaches are also selected by teachers in order to support the development in students of interpretive and inferencing skills, particularly interpretation of the relations between forms and meanings.

For example, in the case of the poem 40 – Love, one aim of the activity of re-writing is to enhance understanding and appreciation of the analogy between a game of tennis and the monotonous regularity of a marriage which, with the partners in their forties, has lost much excitement and originality in the relationship. The very oppositions and balances in the structure of the poem compel us to reflect on the nature of ‘love’ in middle age. The act of reconstructing the poem can be a way of writing one’s way into this kind of reading.

1.3 Stylistic approaches

It would, of course, be naive to suggest that there are no limitations or disadvantages to language-based approaches. The disadvantages are to some extent shared with stylistics and it is to the issues of stylistics and the teaching of literature that attention can now be given. Such a move recognises an important continuum between language-based approaches and stylistics, the former providing as it were a pre-stylistic basis for subsequently more systematic and rigorous scrutiny of language (for illustrations see Carter and Long 1987, and for further discussion see Carter and Long 1991). An example of a stylistic approach can be illustrated by the following text, which is the first stanza from a poem by the American poet e e cummings:

yes is a pleasant country

If’s wintry

(my lovely)

Let’s open the year.

The poem uses very simple language. But the poem is ungrammatical and it is also semantically deviant. We don’t open years; conjunctions do not normally appear in subject position. How can yes be a country, and so on? But I have watched with fascination how groups of students in many parts of the world, sometimes discussing in English or in their mother tongue – according to level – can begin to unpick its meanings, begin to interpret it, begin to make it make sense, by exploring the language as a starting point.

Most groups end up with a reading which takes its cue from the brackets ‘(my lovely)’. It is read as a love poem or an interchange between lovers. The speaker is trying to persuade his or her lover to say yes, to be affirmative and positive – to make yes not deviant but normal. To keep saying if imposes conditions (if is a conditional) – it makes the response cold and unpleasant. The speaker is appealing for a new start – for a new beginning to a new year. Let’s move (metaphorically) from a cold to a warm country. Saying yes is warm; saying if is cold.

This kind of discussion of this kind of text is rooted in the devel...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Language, Literature and the Learner
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Contributors
• General Editor's Preface
• Publisher's acknowledgements
• Editors' acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Look both ways before crossing: developments in the language and literature classroom
• 2 Representational language learning: from language awareness to text awareness
• 3 Stylistics ‘upside down': using stylistic analysis in the teaching of language and literature
• 4 Designing groupwork activities: a case study
• 5 Reconstructing and deconstructing: drama texts in the classroom
• 6 That's for your poetry book!
• 7 Picking holes: cloze procedures in prose
• 8 Learner autonomy and literature teaching
• 9 Making the subtle difference: literature and non-literature in the classroom
• 10 ‘Interfacing' language and literature: with special reference to the teaching of British cultural studies
• 11 ‘Viewer, I married him': literature on video
• 12 Common ground: incorporating new literatures in English in language and literature teaching
• Bibliography
• Index