Investigating Student Reactions to a Web-Based Stylistics Course in Different National and Educational Settings

Abstract

Although native English-speaking teachers of literature in English have sometimes shown a theoretical interest in the pedagogy of literature teaching, by and large they have tended to assume that an interest in their subject and associated texts, and a generally humane and humanist approach to discussing texts and issues, is more or less all that is required. Teachers of stylistics like to be involved in such discussion with their students too, but they have also been interested in the ‘nuts and bolts’ of teaching stylistics, and language and literature more generally. This is partly because stylisticians are predisposed to be interested in the more minute details of whatever they are investigating, and partly because having a foot in the linguistics/English language camp as well as the literature camp means that they have had to work harder to interest students in their area of study. By and large, nativespeaking students of English literature love reading and talking about literature, but are less keen to study the language of literary texts in the systematic, analytical and precise detail that stylistics requires, and so the stylisticians have been forced to think harder about how to engage their students with what they teach.

Too many people and organizations have helped with the web-based version of Language and Style to make acknowledgement here practicable. A full acknowledgements list can be found on the course home page at http://www.lancs.ac.uk/fass/projects/stylistics.