Stylistics goes to school

Abstract

Stylistics offers a wealth of benefits to English teachers who wish to integrate aspects of language and literature together, and to engage their students in a text-driven, reader-response informed grammar pedagogy. Recently, there has been a growing interest in how stylistics can be re-contextualised to schools, with academics working collaboratively with teachers in teacher workshops, school curriculum reform and classroom-based research. In this paper, I aim to provide a picture of what this work looks like, and I argue that it presents an important moment in the history of stylistics, both as a discipline and as a pedagogical method. The re-contextualisation of stylistics to schools has the potential to further validate academic research findings, as well as offering English teachers an enabling and accessible toolkit for teaching about language and literature that is likely to sit comfortably with their own beliefs about the subject. However, there are various logistical and political complexities involved, such as access to training, teacher subject knowledge and teacher attitudes towards linguistics. In light of these complexities, I discuss the design and implementation of a training course about stylistics for teachers, and how course participants have taken the knowledge acquired and actualised it in their own practice. I also present some of the barriers that teachers have faced in trying to do so. I argue that stylistics is beneficial for teachers, and that the present moment presents an important and potentially fruitful time for the discipline.