Studying Language through Literature : An Old Perspective Revisited and Something More [1 ed.] 9781443871105, 9781443859783

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Studying Language through Literature

Studying Language through Literature: An Old Perspective Revisited and Something More

Emilia Di Martino and Bruna Di Sabato

Studying Language through Literature: An Old Perspective Revisited and Something More, by Emilia Di Martino* and Bruna Di Sabato** *Author of Chapters 2, 5 and 6 ** Author of Chapters 1, 3 and 4 This book first published 2014 Cambridge Scholars Publishing 12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2014 by Emilia Di Martino, Bruna Di Sabato All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-5978-8, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-5978-3

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements and Thanks ................................................................ vii Preface ........................................................................................................ ix Chapter One ................................................................................................. 1 Language through Literature: Back to the ‘New’ 1.1 Preamble 1.2 On the language/literature relation in educational contexts 1.3 On the literary text as a language learning opportunity 1.4 On ‘authentic’ language, texts, culture 1.5 But how? On the ‘whens’ and ‘whats’ of literature in language pedagogy 1.6 What next? Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 21 Literary Fiction: The “Good Bad Book” 2.1 Literary fiction, or On the literary text as a speech event 2.2 What books in the language classroom? or How to explore Young Adult Literature for language learning Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 63 Well-versed: Enhancing Language Awareness through Poetry 3.1 On the use of poetry in language teaching 3.2 Introducing poetry to learners 3.3 Exploiting poems in the language class 3.4 Other types of poetic language 3.5 Poetry as the texture for many tasks Chapter Four .............................................................................................. 83 Playing a Part: Drama in the Language Classroom 4.1 On educational drama 4.2 Defining drama 4.3 Drama in the current pedagogical trends 4.4 A few more tips

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Contents

Chapter Five .............................................................................................. 93 Found in Translation: Contrastive Language Analysis as the Basis for Comparative Literature 5.1 On ‘applied’ translation criticism 5.2 Applying translation criticism to foreign language teaching Chapter Six .............................................................................................. 113 Nearing a Conclusion and a Coda: Assessing Literature through Language, Language through Literature 6.1 Pulling the threads together 6.2 A coda References ............................................................................................... 131 Index ........................................................................................................ 155

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS AND THANKS

Our thanks go to our families, whom we ask to forgive long absences of mind (and body) over the last few years, and to Maria Teresa Chialant, Bronwen Hughes and Patrizia Vigliotti, who patiently read the first draft of this volume, easing the production process and positively impacting the final result with their much appreciated suggestions.

PREFACE

Che lingua letteraria e lingua d’uso si scostino di qualche poco, e talora d’una pertica buona, poco mi ci struggo: ma davvero: e non sarà la fin del mondo. Anche le gonne d’una marchesa diversificano a chiare note da quelle della Marianna, pur essendo catalogabili entro i termini dell’idea «gonne» le une e le altre. – Carlo Emilio Gadda, Lingua letteraria e lingua dell’uso, 19421

The reader will forgive the authors if a volume written in English opens with an Italian quotation. We do not deny this choice is a tribute to our mother tongue, but also hope it will not be looked upon as mere parochialism. In a book devoted to the exploration of the benefits of the literary text to language education, Gadda’s words are highly significant, due to his undeniable quality as a language innovator and to his ability to successfully blend academic language, dialect, technical jargon and many other language varieties in his literary production. De facto literary language differs from the language of use, though the two are strongly intertwined and lack clearly-demarcated boundaries: Gadda’s witty incipit – from a well-known essay which contributed to the debate on the topic in the lively intellectual milieu in Italy in those years – underlines the relationship in varietate concordia. This volume aims to elaborate on that unity not only by exploiting the ‘diversity’ between the language of literature and the language of use but also by considering the ‘literary’ aspects of ‘ordinary’ language. Our work stems from the initial consideration that, despite the close relationship between the two, the destiny of literature in language education – at least in foreign language education – seems to have been determined by the association of literature with teaching practices which were judged unsuccessful and subsequently abandoned in favour of texts of the nonliterary type, considered closer to ‘real’ language. The quest for authenticity has led to a view of literary language as ‘not authentic’ because it has been artfully created to reproduce fictional

 1

That the language of literature and that of common use should stand a span, and oft-times a full arm's length apart, truly worries me but little, and will not bring the world to a halt. Indeed, the skirts of a marchioness bear little resemblance to those of Marianna, yet both clearly pertain to the domain of 'skirts’ (our translation).

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Preface

objects. And yet, literature seems to express an emphasized perception of reality – be it private, collective, or pertaining to a certain temporal/spatial context. Similarly, literary language exploits the potentialities of a language to their utmost. And it is precisely this view of literature and of literary language that has led us to a reconsideration of the opportunity represented by literary texts for educational purposes. Moreover, contemporary literature tends to be closer to Marianna’s attire, in that it imitates what we have referred to as ‘the language of use’ (Gadda’s lingua d’uso). And Marianna’s skirts are certainly no less appealing than the marchioness’s. We shall outline the philosophy that governs our research work and teaching practice (Chapter 1), and offer a specific insight on the use of the different literary genres: fiction, poetry and drama, each in separate chapters (Chapters 2 to 4). The opportunities represented by translation in the foreign language class constitute a recurrent theme throughout the book, but Chapter 5 will be entirely devoted to translation criticism. In the closing pages we will put forward a few reflections on assessment: we hope the Coda may be auspicious for the development and expansion of research in this delicate yet crucial area of education. We are aware that the ‘pacing’ varies from chapter to chapter, as the reader will undoubtedly notice; this might have been avoided had we adhered to a pre-established format. However, in view of our different backgrounds, we decided to allow ourselves a certain leeway when approaching the various themes, meaning that the chapters are more orientated towards either a linguistic or a pedagogical approach. Hopefully, this will serve to bolster our ultimate aim, that of offering useful food for thought in order to reassess the role of literature in the language class. The reader must feel free to pick, mix and adjust the ideas, considerations and suggestions we have put together, and exploit them to her/his greatest benefit. EDM and BDS

CHAPTER ONE LANGUAGE THROUGH LITERATURE: BACK TO THE ‘NEW’

(…) in literature we find not reference to reality conventionally conceived but representation of alternative constructs of reality, not actual but possible worlds, existing in a different dimension. These cannot of their nature simply be recognized by calling up relevant schematic knowledge: they have to be realized through the language which creates them. – Henry G. Widdowson, Aspects of Language Teaching, 1990

1.1 Preamble After years of strict adherence to the educational philosophy of the moment and the consequent rejection of all that preceded it, the tendency now in language pedagogy is to avoid any taxonomy in terms of good/bad, old/new, traditional/innovative practices. As Parkinson and Reid Thomas point out regarding methods: - Most ‘new’ methods, or something like them, were present in many ‘old’ classes; - Many ‘old’ methods are still found, indeed very commonly today; - ‘Old’ methods may be justified in all sorts of ways, not least by learner expectations and what learners and teachers are comfortable with; - In any case, the opposition between new and old methods is an unreal one (Parkinson and Reid Thomas 2010 [2000]: 27).

It has therefore finally been acknowledged that in the field of language pedagogy most materials, techniques and activities will work, provided they are consistent with the set goals of the learning experience. Within this general framework, which could be defined as a humanized learnercentred inductive approach to language education, pragmatic effectiveness in communication plays a pivotal role and, in order to bring about a conscious use of verbal and non verbal communicative tools, we are here pro-

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Chapter One

posing further reconsideration of the presence of literature in language education.1 Far from being an invitation to the combined teaching of language and literature, or an invitation to language teachers to teach literature, hopefully the following pages will shed new light on an old acquaintance (literature) which language teachers have never lost sight of, but which is still not considered ‘good practice’, especially among those who favour real and contextualized language learning. This is very well explained by Shanahan 1997 with reference to the U.S. learning environment, which is pervaded by “utilitarian goals” that influence the development of the language curriculum. In this context, “the language and literature teacher may understandably feel like an alien from another planet because (…) he or she believes intuitively in the value of literature” (Shanahan 1997: 166). Before pursuing the issue, a degree of clarification is called for: what we have in mind most of the time while investigating and speculating on the possible repercussions of our arguments on language learning is undoubtedly second/foreign language learning. Nonetheless, in many cases what is discussed here is equally applicable to first language education and to learners of any age and level of competence. Indeed, we adhere to a general philosophy of education which sees the ‘who’, ‘where’, and ‘when’ as the factors which must be taken into due consideration to establish the ‘what’ and ‘how’: the learner and her/his needs, the set goals, the place and context, the distribution and duration of the learning experience, have equal importance in determining the teacher’s choices in terms of contents and methodology. And literature is no exception: the benefits for language learning deriving from activities based on literary texts cannot be taken for granted, since any successful outcome in this field largely depends on the ability of the teacher and/or the author of teaching materials to make choices proceeding from careful scrutiny of these factors. Among the many possible teaching situations and the theories explaining literature and/or how to use it in the classroom, teachers have to “draw on the range of insights available, and then to develop an approach appropriate and relevant to their students” (Lazar 2010 [1993]: 1). As previously mentioned, we will try to focus on the current relation between language and literature from a language instruction perspective,

 1

The general philosophy of the research work presented in this part of the book has evolved through a number of stages. We initially observed current practice in our country, then compared it with other EU academic environments, and finally matched these empirical data with recent publications on the topic. Some of these considerations have already appeared in print, the most recent publication being Di Sabato 2013

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3

mainly referring to studies in the field of English Language Teaching, English linguistics and stylistics. In doing so we will not be paying attention to seminal literature on the subject in other languages: there are so many works, from so many perspectives, that boundaries must be drawn. As to the structure of the volume, in this first chapter we will treat the literary text in general terms; the parts that follow will be specifically devoted to the different genres and to other particular aspects of literature.2

1.2 On the language/literature relation in educational contexts Attention has always been paid to the relationship between language and literature in educational contexts, although most of the works in English were written more than ten years ago, and textbooks devoted to the teaching of English as a foreign language through a literature-based approach are even older, with publications dating back to the 1980s. Exceptions are Hall 2005, Pope 2012 [1998], some studies on the applications of drama techniques in language teaching (Anderson, Hughes and Manuel 2008; Bournot-Trites, Belliveau, Spiliotopulos and Séror 2007, Dunn and Stinson 2011; Silver, Goh and Alsagoff 2009; Tschurtschenthaler 2013, Winston 2012, and the Special Issue of RIDE 2011), together with the interesting research work by Hanauer on the use of poetry in the classroom (20072010). When speaking about the role of literature in language learning, we shall focus above all on the “use” rather than on the “study” of literature (Maley 1989), i.e. on literature as a “resource” (in the study of language) and not on literature as “the subject” of study (Parkinson and Reid Thomas 2010 [2000]). But the relationship between the two should not be looked at as a dichotomy, as if language and literature were two “poles” (Parkinson and Reid Thomas 2010 [2000]) with no respective attraction. Rather, it would be fruitful to define them as two good neighbours who, due to academic policy, are separated by bad borders (we will clarify this later). Most books keep the two subjects distinct, attaching a different weight to each, seeing language as a tool for understanding literature or vice versa; as a result, one inevitably counts for more than the other. This distinction is not at all productive and, especially in the field of text-based instruction, what is said about one ‘neighbour’ can be equally valid for the other. Ac-

 2

The examples in the book are taken from literary works in English and in Italian due to our familiarity with these two languages. However, the suggested approach may be adopted for works in different languages or pairs of languages.

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Chapter One

tually, in many instances, it is not easy to draw boundaries between texts pertaining to the two types: Many real life teaching situations have features of both ‘types’, together with a measure of ambiguity and room for negotiation, and even when the ‘types’ are distinguishable, identical or analogous theoretical reasoning or practical procedures can sometimes be usable in both (Parkinson and Reid Thomas 2010 [2000]: 2).

The difficulty in keeping the two separated is often illustrated by the tendency of some very specific works in the field of language education to shift occasionally to the teaching and learning of literature when dealing with the use of literary texts as a resource in the language class. Rosenblatt’s theory of reading, based on the “efferent-aesthetic continuum” (1983 [1938]), further encourages us to reject a sharp division between the literary and the non literary in text-based language teaching. While recalling how she developed her theoretical model, Rosenblatt observes: “As I sought to understand how we make the meanings called novels, poems or plays, I discovered that I had developed a theoretical model that covers all modes of reading” (Rosenblatt 2004: 1363). In line with transactional approaches dominant in the 20th century, Rosenblatt sees reading as a process determined by the reader’s adoption of a “stance”, i.e. that selective attitude which guides the reader to focus attention on certain aspects, while “pushing others into the fringes of consciousness” (Rosenblatt 2004: 1372). The reader may adopt a predominantly efferent stance, “abstracting out and analytically structuring ideas, information, directions, or conclusions to be retained, used or acted on after the reading event” (1373), or a predominantly aesthetic stance, paying attention to the “qualities of the feelings, ideas, situations, scenes, personalities, and emotions that are called forth”, thus participating “in the tensions, conflicts, and resolutions of the images, ideas, and scenes as they unfold” (1373). When we refer to a text by defining it in terms of any of the categories we are accustomed to (as, for example, efferent or aesthetic, literary or non literary, regulatory or informative), we are reporting our interpretation of the writer’s intention with regard to the type of reading the text should receive, but this does not exclude the fact that the reader may apply a predominant stance – efferent or aesthetic – thus determining her/his attitude and reaction toward any text. Rosenblatt’s is an important perspective for the teacher using literature for teaching languages, essentially rejecting the dichotomy “scientific” and “artistic”, or literary and non-literary, and placing different texts and different readings on a continuum between efferent and aesthetic: “Although

Language through Literature: Back to the ‘New’

5

many readings may fall near the extremes, many others, perhaps most, may fall nearer the center of the continuum” (1374). Turning our attention again to the language teaching perspective, some critics point out that the use of literature as a language learning tool may lead to an increase in literary competence (Lazar 2010 [1993]). Recalling Rosenblatt’s theory, Kramsch (2004 [1993]) indirectly implies that benefits may accrue to literary competence through the introduction of literary texts in language teaching. She wisely observes that: The kind of readers teacher and students decide to be will determine the extent of their involvement with the text and the nature of the meanings their dialogue with the text will generate. If they read the text as a paradigm for certain grammatical structures, that meaning will be purely grammatical. If they read the story in an efferent manner, it will be given a purely referential meaning. If they choose to give it an aesthetic reading, multiple layers of meaning will emerge from their personal response to the text (Kramsch 2004 [1993]: 137-138).

Parkinson and Reid Thomas (2010 [2000]: 32) suggest that literaturebased language teaching might even be a way to introduce literature “by the back door”, thereby alleviating the pressure on learners who may feel less at ease if aware that they are in the presence of a literary text. Henning (1993) further stresses that the benefits to the language learner are not purely in terms of language competence, because linguistic and cognitive skills as well as cultural knowledge and sensitivity may be enhanced through literature. We may ask, therefore, what underlies the attitude towards treating the subject of literary education as distinct from language education when, especially in a more general framework of meaning-based/text-based instruction, literature and language education develop similar learning paths which rely on analogous activities. Excessive attention to the so-called special purposes of language learning and to the communicative features of specialist domains in the field of applied linguistics in the last twenty years or so suggests that the “utilitarian” approach to language learning seems to prevail, in line with what Shanahan (1997) observed about the U.S. situation (see § 1.1). To this we may add Cook’s (2006 [1998]) remarks in his entry “Literature” in the Encyclopedic Dictionary of Applied Linguistics regarding the already mentioned perception of literature in language education as a “traditional” and somewhat “dated” approach that has its origin in the humanist tradition of reading the classics in their original language:

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Chapter One In the classical humanist educational tradition, the study of literature is not only a means of language learning, but its goal: a major reason for learning a language, in other words, is to read its literature. (…) Language learning in which literature is central inevitably focuses more upon the written than the spoken language, and tends to make the learner’s experience of the language passive rather than active (Cook 2006 [1998]: 205).

Cook ascribes the decline of the study of literature mainly to the “emphases on spoken language and functional communication, together with a broader view of culture” (Cook 2006 [1998]: 205). Moreover, stylistics cannot be said to contribute to a fruitful approach to literature from the language learner’s perspective. We will address these three points later. The present-day division seems to stem from the existence of “bad borders”, with academic practice keeping these adjacent fields wellseparated. Kramsch (2004 [1993]) explains this academic habit as a sort of “self-defence” mechanism implemented by language teachers who are led to believe they are not competent to teach (or, rather, ‘touch’) literature. Such academic attitudes and policies had already been noticed by Widdowson who, as early as 1975, argued that the distinction between teaching language and literature was made in order to maintain boundaries between different academic areas. In short, there doesn’t appear to have been a well-grounded justification for the division, but merely academic policies aimed at preserving a certain status quo (Widdowson 1975).

1.3 On the literary text as a language learning opportunity On the basis of the type of instruction received, students are led to reason in terms of disciplinary areas. It should be a teacher’s priority to illustrate the ever present connections between contents and approaches throughout the knowledge-building process. In trying to redefine the relationship, it is generally recognized that in a language learning context a literary text has to be considered and treated much the same way as any other text-type, while not denying its added value of foregrounding those text features learners have to be aware of because they are common to any text. By presenting some text-based tasks, Lazar (2010 [1993]) demonstrates how hard it can be to distinguish those texts which are defined as ‘literary’ from those which are not. Actually, she is not alone in highlighting the difficulty of recognizing specifically literary language peculiarities (Lott 1988; Gilroy and Parkinson 1997). The issue is so sensitive that some authors even propose distinctions other than literary/non literary which might function as a reference when we are dealing with such spheres as language, texts and communication (see Sinclair 1982’s “fic-

Language through Literature: Back to the ‘New’

7

tional”/“non fictional”; or the aforementioned “efferent” and “aesthetic” reading). This is because there is no such thing as a specialised type of literary language, as there is for specific fields (e.g. medicine or law, for example) or specific media (e.g. the press, television or the web). Literature presents a form of discourse in which “any use of language is permissible” (Lazar 2010 [1993]: 6) and literary language possesses several features which occur in other forms of discourse. The difference is that in literary texts language features are exploited to reinforce the message of the text (Lazar 2010 [1993]; Brumfit and Carter 1986): metaphors and similes, assonance and alliteration, repetitions (of words or phrases), unusual syntactic patterns, double or multiple meanings of a word, poeticisms, mixing of styles and registers. A literary text may thus function as a language booster, by highlighting those language characteristics which a learner has to be acquainted with because such features are found in any form of discourse. Stress on the ability of literary texts to foreground linguistic features may be due to the huge amount of work done in the field of stylistics, a close study of the literary text which is seen by many as belonging to the sphere of language and linguistics rather than literature and literary criticism. This approach is not unanimously accepted from the literary studies perspective and theory has evolved considerably since its first appearance; in Sinclair’s words (2008 [1966]: 3): “Many attempts have been made to “carry the reader to the brink of linguistics.” Nevertheless, stylistics is widely taught to increase competence in literature and it has also been considered of benefit to language learning because it enables “students to make meaningful interpretations of the text itself”; moreover it expands “students’ knowledge and awareness of the language in general” (Lazar 2010: 31. See also Short 1988 and 1996). Halliday’s arguments in favour of linguistic stylistics to describe literary texts indirectly also highlight the advantages offered by such literary texts in the language class: the meaning of a text is reconstructed by reference to the text itself and also to what that text is not and “what it might have been”. Since “the most relevant exponent of the ‘might have been’ of a work of literature is another work of literature” (Halliday 2002 [1964]: 9), we have to reconstruct the meaningfulness of a text by an essentially comparative procedure aimed at comparing that text to other texts of the same period. According to Halliday,“[t]he more texts are studied, the more anything is said about any one text becomes interesting and relevant” (Halliday 2002 [1964]: 9). Halliday’s approach might well be effective to raise awareness of the many language resources we have to produce meaning and the many factors which guide our choice. In fact, we may compare the creative use of language in literary works to other types of language

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Chapter One

use in texts pertaining to other domains in order to determine the relative frequency of a given grammatical feature within a text and in other works pertaining to the same classification, be it by period, genre or domain. In Lazar’s words: For the language learner, stylistics has the advantage of illustrating how particular linguistic forms function to convey specific messages (…) it not only helps students to use their existing knowledge of the language to understand and appreciate literary texts, it also deepens their knowledge of the language itself. Stylistic analysis can also provide a way of comparing different types of texts (whether literary or non-literary) in order to ascertain how they fulfil different social functions (Lazar 2010 [1993]: 32).

However, this approach is still literature-oriented: if it is adopted in a foreign language learning context, it has to be adapted to the different learners and goals. Those who favour the use of literature in the language classroom are aware that a language learner has attitudes and intuitions about language which differ from those of a native speaker who approaches a literary text using stylistic analysis. Native speakers and foreign language learners clearly have different linguistic, cultural and literary backgrounds (Lazar 2010 [1993]). In any case, the supporters of stylistic analysis for language learning purposes see it as advantageous since it can increase motivation by giving learners a key to understanding how language is used in literary texts (among others Carter 1985). Conversely, some scholars object that language cannot be learnt through stylistic analysis and that it also deprives learners of the pleasure deriving from reading. The literary text is reduced to something that is “inert” (Gower 1986: 126). A stylistic approach to the text may be useful to stimulate reflection on language, but if applied too strictly, it may deprive learning of that invaluable process of meaning construction that engages the learner/reader and fuels her/his motivation. Furthermore, while not denying its value as a language learning resource, some authors are alert to the dangers deriving from a simplistic conception of stylistics as a linguistic approach to literature: Stylistics however poses a number of problems as an inspiration for language teaching. By drawing attention to the ways in which literary language often departs from normal usage, it has raised doubts about the validity of literary language as a model for all but the most advanced language learners (Cook 2006 [1998]: 206).

And by prompting learners to concentrate on “unusual linguistic choices and their relation to meaning”, the stylistic approach to texts may lead to a

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rejection of a more “relaxed” view of literary language “as a transparent medium”, like any other text type (Cook 2006 [1998]: 205). Kramsch (2004 [1993]) redirects attention to the importance of meaning over form, starting from the conviction that any text, regardless of its nature – be it of the informative or literary type – is made up of language. The real question, she feels, cannot be whether language teachers should teach literature but how to promote a reading approach which accommodates the many different levels of meaning. A frequent objection to any text-based teaching is that it favours reading skills while leaving less room for spoken skills. Several authors, however, stress the opportunities a literary text offers for generating discussion and interaction. Duff and Maley (2007), for instance, argue that one of the features of a literary text is that it is open to multiple interpretations, which is ideal for stimulating spoken interaction. Once again referring to Rosenblatt’s transactional approach (§1.2), Carroli (2008) gives convincing evidence of the added value of literature as the basis for “dialogic learning”: her class experiments conducted on a group of students whose first language was English studying Italian as a second language (L2) confirm her view of the class as a “micro-hermeneutic community, where students can compare their interpretations and reading approaches, learn to negotiate and, if necessary, readjust their understanding of the literary text and their approach to reading” (Carroli 2008: 96). While perceived as reading based, as Carroli illustrates, dialogic learning inevitably implies spoken interaction among participants (see also Kramsch’s 2004 [1993] “dialogic classroom”). Moreover, more than one author believes the literary text favours the learner’s creative self-expression.3 Last but not least, we can mention Lazar’s view that literary texts offer opportunities at higher levels to learn the language without the learner being aware of the process, which is similar to a content-based approach to language learning: “students may be so absorbed in the plot and characters of an authentic novel or short story, that they acquire a great deal of new language almost in passing” (Lazar 2010 [1993]: 17). To sum up, the advantages of using a literary text as the basis for language activities are generally to be found in its potential to raise awareness about the language system, foster creativity, provide an ideal starting point

 3

See for instance Hanauer’s studies on poetry reading and writing in second language contexts: 2001-2010. An in-depth investigation of the issue of creative selfexpression via literature-based learning is presented in Chapter 3.

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Chapter One

for meaning construction, and stimulate recognition and discussion of (inter)cultural issues.4 Before turning to these topics, we have to address the issue of authenticity, still one of the prime concerns both of most language teachers and of those who develop language teaching materials.5

1.4 On ‘authentic’ language, texts, culture Widdowson’s views on the issue of the authenticity of texts in a language learning context have caused much debate and have led to a revision of the radical attitudes that attach unique and irreplaceable value to language instruction. He touched on the subject on many occasions, gradually developing a more articulate view of the intrinsic nature of the non-authenticity of any language used in the learning environment, that is to say out of its context of use. Already in 1990 he argued that it is possible to refer to teaching materials as being “authentic” insofar as they are “instances of use” (Widdowson 1990: 137), seeking to clarify the question of authenticity by introducing the differentiation between “genuine” and “authentic”: materials might be a “genuine” record of native speaker production, but not “authentic” because they lack the native speaker’s response. Thus they are not “authentic discourse” (Widdowson 1990: 45). From our point of view, even more illuminating was his rejection in 1998 of the issue of authenticity along with other “catchphrases” which had come to dominate educational linguistics. The very concept of authenticity is not relevant to the language used in class: This is what many people would have us believe in their campaign for authentic language, real English in the classroom. I would, on the contrary,

 4

The three models proposed by Carter and Long 1991 to justify the use of literature, the “cultural model”, the “language model” and the “personal growth model”, are also in line with our approach: the cultural model presents students with cultures and ideologies that are different in time and space in order to foster appreciation and understanding and consequently educate their perception of feelings and artistic forms; the language model promotes a view of language as the literary medium, i.e. by reading “through” language, students will learn how to approach a text as a piece of literature while also learning specific vocabulary and structures; the personal growth model aims at a deep consciousness of the pleasure of reading and of the increasing understanding that reading generates: while appreciating and evaluating cultural artefacts, students achieve a better understanding of society and of their role within it. 5 The issue has already been dealt with by the authors in previous publications. See, for example, Di Martino 2009.

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argue against using authentic language in the classroom, on the fairly reasonable grounds that it is actually impossible to do so. The language cannot be authentic because the classroom cannot provide the contextual conditions for it to be authenticated by the learners. The authenticity or reality of language use in its normal pragmatic functioning depends on its being localised within a particular discourse community. Listeners can only authenticate it as discourse if they are insiders. But learners are outsiders, by definition, not members of user communities. So the language that is authentic for native speaker users cannot possibly be authentic for learners (Widdowson 1998: 711).

Nowadays authenticity seems to have become a minor problem, and with Cook (2000) we would agree that in real life there are many activities which, though not ‘real’, are by no means considered as useful: On the contrary it would seem that the complexity of human social and economic affairs depends upon such ‘unreal’ behaviour. Reality and artifice are complementary, and each strengthens our understanding of the other. Why language teaching alone should be singled out as an area where everything should be real, and where the ‘real’ is somehow better than artifice, is unclear (Cook 2000: 172).

As for literature, whether it is defined as “authentic” (Parkinson and Reid Thomas 2010 [2000]) or “genuine” (Duff and Maley 2007), it is generally agreed that these are qualities that literary texts possess, providing the opportunity to expose learners to “a variety of registers, styles, and text-types at many levels of difficulty” (Duff and Maley 2007: 5): “This ‘genuine’ feel of literary texts is a powerful motivator, especially when allied to the fact the literary texts so often touch on themes to which learners can bring a personal response from their own experience” (Duff and Maley 1990, cit. in Parkinson and Reid Thomas 2010 [2000]: 10). The issue becomes even more complicated when the debate shifts to cultural features in literary texts. In this case, the very concept of authenticity is quite fiercely debated. One of the advantages of using literary texts listed by Duff and Maley (2007) is that they are a vehicle for culture. However, as the authors explain, this means not that by reading literature you may “learn” the culture which lies behind a language, but rather that the elements contained in literary texts offer an occasion for “raising awareness of difference and for developing tolerance and understanding” (Duff and Maley 2007: 6). Literary works are fictitious and this must be clear to those who use them in class. They portray reality in a way that can be ‘realistic’ but that is not ‘real’; they can be realistic to the point of creating the illusion of reality but they are by definition works of fiction. Indeed, “there is a danger

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Chapter One

that students will fall into the fallacy of assuming that a novel, for example, represents the totality of a society, when in fact it is a highly atypical account of one particular milieu during a specific historical period” (Lazar 2010 [1993]: 16). Viewing the issue under a different light, the reading of a literary text can be considered a way to gain awareness of the “strong undercurrents of the time and place in which it was written”: No one who has genuinely exposed himself or herself to a work by Dickens can claim to be a stranger to the world of 19th-century Britain; no one who has read Dante can visit contemporary Italy without a sense of déjà vu. These are aspects of the study of literature that we take for granted (Shanahan 1997: 167).

An uncritical use of literature as a means to convey the culture of the people who speak the language may also be dangerous and learners have to be well aware that: (…) few novels or poems could claim to be a purely factual documentation of their society. (…) There is a danger that students will fall into the fallacy of assuming that a novel, for example, represents the totality of a society, when in fact it is a highly atypical account of one particular milieu during a specific historical period (Lazar 2010 [1993]: 16).

There is little doubt that literature provides an invaluable chance to raise intercultural awareness. Indeed, the use of English as a global language makes the literature written in English not just the expression of the English speaking countries but rather the reflection of “the rich and fascinating diversities of our world” (Lazar 2010 [1993]: 16). Literature, therefore, is a useful medium to introduce learners to cultural and linguistic difference: of course, in order to foreground such features, literature sometimes unrealistically emphasizes certain traits. But it is exactly this quality of the literary text which gives the teacher the opportunity to trigger spontaneous recognition on behalf of learners. Cultural features are generally foregrounded by reference to places, objects, facts, persons, behaviour, and so on, but also by linguistic devices, such as the introduction of elements pertaining to different language varieties and registers. In other words, an intensive exploitation of the language medium on behalf of the writer allows for a (…) representation of alternative constructs of reality, not actual but possible worlds, existing in a different dimension. (…) Even when literature makes mention of objects, places, and events which are familiar, they have to be located in the created context of an imagined world which

Language through Literature: Back to the ‘New’

13

cannot be familiar, so their significance is never just a matter of recognition (Widdowson 1990: 177).

This “self-enclosed world” can be created only thanks to “intensive exploitation” of the potentialities of language. And the writer’s work has to be complemented by the reader’s analogous activity of “a particularly intensive exploitation of the language medium. And of course the literary writer encourages the reader in such exploitation”, in order to enable him/her to gain access to the fictitious world (Widdowson 1990: 177-178). The subject of authenticity brings us back to language and how it is used to build up different worlds. The “obsession” (Cook 2004: 111) with authenticity can be left aside as it depends on the contingent combination of the reader’s response, the text’s discourse type and the writer’s communicative purpose in producing authentic discourse, rather than on the use of ‘genuine’ texts to promote ‘authentic’ language use in the learning environment: “Genuiness is a characteristic of the passage itself and is an absolute quality. Authenticity is a characteristic of the relationship between the passage and the reader and it has to do with appropriate response” (Widdowson 1978: 80).

1.5 But how? On the ‘whens’ and ‘whats’ of literature in language pedagogy So why and at what point is it an advantage to introduce work on literary texts? We have already implicitly answered this question, but we wish to debunk the age old adage which claims that the main purpose of literature is to introduce students to more ‘difficult’ language: (…) a look at university curricula in many countries, from Germany to Pakistan, seems to reveal an assumption that at a certain point learners come to the ‘end of language’, and that the only way to keep stretching them, and sorting out the sheep from the goats (…), is by asking difficult questions about Shakespeare (Parkinson and Reid Thomas 2010 [2000]: 10).

From our experience at Italian universities we are inclined to agree that most language at an advanced level is taught via literary texts, especially in the field of foreign language teaching, and especially in the case of languages which are different from English. The contention that “if you do have, say, an advanced European university class, you may have to accept that literature teaching has complex

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institutional foundations, and that you are not allowed to make it too easy” (Parkinson and Reid Thomas 2010 [2000]: 10) is rather questionable: it generates a less productive use of literature which also has a negative impact on learners’ motivation to exploit the literary text as a treasure trove of language resources which serve to enrich language competence. And yet, the assumption that the literary text is difficult to cope with and is only an advantage at a later stage of learning is common to many. According to Widdowson (1990: 177-180), literature is the best medium, after communicative activities, to informally introduce grammar elements, thus allowing for a gradual transition to “‘natural’ language behaviour” and the consequent ability to depart from systemic knowledge while referring to it when required as a sort of “back-up resource”. After this first stage of “communicative grammar” and problem-solving activities, a later stage, devoted to “the teaching of meaning”, is required. Such procedures for negotiating meaning can be based on literature seen as a source for texts “of particular interest” within this framework. As Widdowson puts it, literary texts are intrinsically appealing to language learners and there is little need for any preparatory activity to elicit the purpose for reading which is generally advisable for other types of text: It is often suggested that learners should be primed to read texts by establishing a purpose for reading beforehand, by preparing them by means of a pre-task which is in effect a pretext. Obviously this can often be an effective strategy. But some texts, notably (though not exclusively) literary ones, are designed to attract attention and so provide their own priming (Widdowson 1990: 178).

Contrary to conventional wisdom regarding the suitability of literary texts only for advanced levels of competence, we agree with Bredella who, in his entry in the Routledge Encyclopedia of Language Teaching and Learning (2004), observes that literature is simply justified by the students’ reaction: if students enjoy reading and speaking and writing about literary texts, why not use them? It is not a question of ‘difficulty’. As we have already pointed out, a text can be approached at various levels and from several perspectives. And a genre is made up of many different texts, presenting various degrees of difficulty, which means that within the same genre it will be possible to choose the most appropriate texts for a given language learning level and purpose. The point is not so much, as Kramsch 2004 [1993] puts it in a chapter devoted to “Teaching the literary text”, to progress from what she defines as “the here-and-now communicative activities” developed at the elemen-

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15

tary level to those “text-bound” discussions which are the focus of levels from intermediate onward (130). Widening our perspective to language education at large, our view is that much depends on the specific learning context and on which language is being learnt, since teaching styles greatly vary from country to country and from language to language, as well as from teacher to teacher. For example, in our personal experience in Italy and in the English as a foreign language context, most of the teaching tends to be organized in strict observance of the communicative approach but is nonetheless highly text-based. And textbooks of English as a foreign language are organized around units that cover all the four basic skills, whose content is largely elicited by an opening text. This might also be a dialogue, but in actual fact such dialogues are frequently presented in their written form. The main difference is that in the case of beginners, the activities are less creative and more manipulative. Kramsch’s question “How can the spoken skills they (the students) developed in the first year to express general meanings be now put to use to express particular meanings?” (Kramsch 2004 [1993]: 130) can be reformulated by eliminating the stress on the progression from spoken to written language: the issue is in fact the progression from general to more particular meanings, whether they are expressed in the spoken or written form. Another point is that if a broader view of literature is adopted, many other examples of the presence of literary texts at lower levels might be mentioned. In early learning there are many instances of literature employed to teach a foreign language, though they are not perceived as such because of a restricted view of literature which has to be overcome to embrace all instances of creative writing if we want to get the most out of its use in language education. We are referring to fairytales, short poems, limericks, songs and so on. Everyone is aware that the use of such texts with young learners serves to raise motivation: exploiting the acoustic effects of language or the curiosity aroused for an intriguing plot is a key to success at any level of competence and with almost any type of learner (see Carter and Long 1991; Collie and Slater 1987, 1994; Collie and Porter Ladousse 1991; Duff and Maley 2007; Lazar 2010 [1993]; McRae 1991; McRae and Boardman 1984; Morgan and Rinvolucri 1983 for examples of what can be achieved using literary texts with older learners at higher levels of competence. And also Ellis and Brewster 1991; Garvie 1990; Morgan and Rinvolucri 1983; Wright 1995, 1997 for lower levels of competence). Once again, it is important to choose materials according to the type of learner and her/his needs and objectives, but in virtually any learning context a literary text has the power to raise the motivation and emotional response of learners (Duff and Maley 2007; Shanahan 1997; Bredel-

16

Chapter One

la 1996), as well as moral and ethical concerns in the classroom (Lazar 2010 [1993]). Yet it is also necessary to shed new light on the act of reading itself, to get the most out of what is considered a “receptive skill” from the language learning perspective. In line with current literary education, reading has to be seen as an active and engaging activity in itself, since “every act of reading is the creation of a text” (Parkinson and Reid Thomas 2010 [2000]: 36. See also Bleich 1975, 1978; Bredella 1996; Fish 1980; Hirvela 1996). Literature, therefore, can be useful to raise motivation, involvement, emotive response, creativity. But all this is only possible if the concept of literature is widened and ‘humanized’ and we come to see a literary text as simply a text, just like a recipe, a research article or an advertisement. The tendency to introduce students to the highest examples of literary works typical of the traditional literature teacher, should be abandoned with no sense of inadequacy on her/his part. It is true that, as Pound (1968 [1929]: 23) puts it, “great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost degree”, but masterpieces and works of “high status” (Lazar 2010 [1993]) are often remote from the learners’ interests, with potentially negative effects on the learning process. By saying that literature has to be humanized to work in the language classroom, we argue that not only should any text be treated using the same approach, be it a piece of literature or a newspaper article, but also that literary texts should be selected regardless of a particular canon so as to make use of the most appropriate literature samples for our purposes. This means accepting what generally goes under the labels of ‘bad literature’, ‘popular literature’, ‘young literature’, and so on, on the assumption that “quite often ‘bad’ writing can prove more productive and stimulating than ‘good’” (Duff and Maley 2007: 9). The point is that texts should not be selected because they are examples of “good writing” but rather because they are “good starting points for using and thinking about language” (Duff and Maley 2007: 9). This is in line with current trends in cultural studies which situate the study of literature in a broader framework, opening up to any literary form, be it ‘new’ or ‘popular’. The growing interest in what non specialists choose to read contributes to an expansion of the notion of literature which is of great benefit to the use of literature from a language perspective. The “re-generating genres” option proposed by Pope 2012 [1998] in his successful book devoted to the study of English literature and language is interesting, too. The scholar re-designs the canonical categories of novel, poetry and drama as three mega-genres, namely “proses” (including

Language through Literature: Back to the ‘New’

17

life-writing and news), “poetries” (including song and performance) and “voices” (including drama, conversation and dialogue in the novels). We agree with Pope’s ‘dynamic’ view of genres as “something we do as well as see”: “gathering and grouping texts is a matter of making as well as finding relations” (Pope 2012 [1998]: 235). Another equally important issue is that of ‘remoteness’ – which is context and reader dependent: a text may be perceived as remote because of historical reasons, as in the case of texts which belong to a different period, but also for geographical or social reasons. Parkinson and Reid Thomas (2010 [2000]), rightly observe that readers from tropical countries may have difficulties with references to the weather, the seasons, and so on, when reading English literature, just as authors like Oscar Wilde and Victoria Sackville-West may not be totally accessible to readers belonging to what they refer to as ‘the working class’. Indeed, anyone involved in teaching languages is likely to have experienced the situation highlighted by Parkinson: “In school and universities many learners, much of the time, are ‘turned off’ by the remoteness of what they have to read” (Parkinson and Reid Thomas 2010 [2000]: 11) and in the case of the literary text this is ascribed to the nature of literary language which is generally considered to be “difficult”, while in fact it is simply “unusual”, “odd” or “deviant”. In actual fact, if the teacher chooses texts far from the students’ experience and background, this may lead to an increased “sense of frustration, inferiority and even powerlessness” (Lazar 2010 [1993]: 3). Texts have to be carefully selected without excluding those not considered part of the traditional literary canon. Selection should be guided by the students’ tastes, interests and lives. Therefore work on a literary text should be carried out by adopting the same approach as with any other text. To imply that a ‘proper’ reading entails knowledge of author, genre, period and other background features may be, as Kramsch argues, “intimidating”: “literary language adds a dimension of particularity that seems like an added difficulty” (Kramsch 2004 [1993]: 106). Moreover it has been argued that this type of approach might lead to a return to old language practices based on teacher’s explanations or interpretations and to translation masquerading as language practice. On the contrary, various authors who stress the similarities between literary and non literary texts (Carter 1982-1997; Carter and McCarthy 2001 [1995]; Carter and Stockwell 2008) agree that the literary text can be “the springboard” for appropriate language learning activities, being an example of language “in use” just like any other text (Hill 1986).

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Chapter One

Teaching materials might be thematically selected and organised, mixing the literary and non-literary, so as to make the learners perceive the literary text as a resource – one among many different types of texts – which provides stimulating language activities. Among the most frequently cited advantages of using literary texts for language activities we can mention: exposure to a wide range of styles and registers; openness to multiple interpretations, providing excellent opportunities for classroom discussion; and focus on genuinely interesting and motivating topics. In lessons which are text-based and focused on language learning, the status of the text as literary is not important since “the activities could equally well be done with a journalistic or non-fiction text – and there is little or no concern with stylistic effect” (Parkinson and Reid Thomas 2010 [2000]: 32). And a literary text is in fact an opportunity to investigate other aspects that are not usually discussed in literature classes: cultural information, particular uses of language, particular meanings, an occasion to “lead learners beyond the looking-glass” (Kramsch 2004 [1993]: 106). As we have already argued in relation to the issue of authenticity, literary texts “contribute to intercultural understanding” (Bredella 2004a, 2004b; Hall 2005) by representing contexts, situations, feelings and reactions which may be far removed (or simply different) from the reader’s own (this is well explained by the cross-cultural approach to teaching literary texts proposed in Kramsch and Nolden 1994). The reader is then obliged to put herself/himself in the position of others: Literary texts produce different readings with different readers. A conversation about such different reading in the foreign language classroom can make learners aware of their prior knowledge, their expectations, and the stereotypes they bring to the text (…). Literary texts depict for example what it means to be a child, a woman, or a member of a minority, and what it means to be in love or to experience death in the foreign culture (Bredella 2004a: 378).

In this context, Kramsch underlines a key feature of literature as having “the ability to represent the particular voice of a writer among the many voices of his or her community and thus to appeal to the particular in the reader” (Kramsch 2004 [1993]: 131). This is in line with the tendency in language learning to depart from conformity to a given speech community and to recognize individual and creative uses of language. Finally, regarding the benefits of exposure to sophisticated uses of language in literary texts, Lazar remarks that this increases awareness about the deviations from common usage (Lazar 2010 [1993]; Widdowson 1975). She also highlights the fact that the multi-layered nature of meaning is reconstructed thanks to the reader’s active role in elaborating what is not

Language through Literature: Back to the ‘New’

19

explicitly written. Moreover, such texts stimulate imagination and emotional awareness, fostering self-confidence and the expression of the reader’s own ideas and emotions in the foreign language.

1.6 What next? In what follows we shall show why and how we need to overcome the perception of the literary text as inevitably tied to more ‘traditional’ approaches to language learning, and as unsuited to teaching contexts intended to develop communicative and pragmatic competencies. In the literary text learners may find a source of motivation and an ideal ground for meaning-construction and creative activities at any level of competence. After carefully selecting texts appropriate to the set goals and underlining their status as fictitious, teachers may exploit foregrounded language and cultural features to guide learners in inductively building up their competence. Although we do not believe in the validity of a totally literary-based syllabus, we strongly feel language teachers have to recognize the potentialities of the literary text within a language pedagogy framework, so as to build up their text-based learning programmes by disregarding any dichotomy and by mixing the literary and the non-literary. Free from any misgivings and preconceptions, text selection has to be guided exclusively by the learners’ preferences and needs, together with the set goals, so as to ‘humanize’ the presence of literature in the educational context. In Cook’s words: “(…) despite changes of approach, misgivings about pedagogic validity and even doubts about its distinct existence as a discourse type, literature continues to be popular with students and an unrivalled resource for the language teacher” (Cook 2006 [1998]: 205).

CHAPTER TWO LITERARY FICTION: THE “GOOD BAD BOOK”

But I hear voices in everything (…). The word is a drama in which three characters participate (it is not a duet but a trio). – Mikhail M. Bakhtin, Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, 1986

2.1. Literary fiction, or On the literary text as a speech event 2.1.1 The presence and role of speaking in writing A re-appropriation of literature in the language classroom necessarily starts not only from a revision of the view of literature as linguistic dislocation (i.e. as what makes “the stone stony” and, in general, all objects ‘unfamiliar’; Shklovsky [1917] in Lemon and Reis 1965),1 but also from a focus on the presence and role of speaking in writing, which was long seriously underestimated by Anglo-American scholarship. Hence it ‘naturally’ starts from attention to literary fiction,2 and from a re-consideration of Bakhtin’s categories.3 The point of departure cannot but be Bakhtin’s ethics of the utterance, which is primarily a dialogical ethics (or an ethics of alterity) based on the principle of vnenakhodimost, or exotopy (outsideness), so that an author creating a character is taken out of him/herself and projects her/his being into this character, thus finding her/himself outside before going back to the self.



See the view of the literary text as being like any other text-type in §1.3 above. This label has been around ever since the ’60s in opposition to popular fiction, and it includes the novel, as a genre, as well as such shorter fictional narratives as short stories and novellas, but also flash fiction. 3 While also keeping in mind that Bakhtin’s polemical tones against poetry were surely due to his need to reverse a deep-rooted prejudice and are only applicable if one takes into consideration lyrical poetry. See Wesling 2003.  1 2

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This principle of alterity is true of all communication and accounts for the double-sidedness (or better, pluri-sidedness) of all words: A word (or in general any sign) is interindividual. Everything that is said, expressed, is located outside the ‘soul’ of the speaker and does not belong only to him [or her]. The word cannot be assigned to a single speaker. The author (speaker) has his own inalienable right to the word, but the listener has his rights, and those whose voices are heard in the word before the author comes upon it also have their rights (after all, there are no words that belong to no one) (Bakhtin 1986: 121-122).

Actually, while applying it to his reading of Dostoevsky’s novel, Bakhtin expands the idea to the entirety of human experience: The dialogic nature of consciousness, the dialogic nature of human life itself. The single adequate form for verbally expressing authentic human existence is the open-ended dialogue. Life by its very nature is dialogic. To live means to participate in dialogue: to ask questions, to heed, to respond, to agree, and so forth. In this dialogue a person participates wholly and throughout his whole life: with his eyes, lips, hands, soul, spirit, with his whole body and deeds. He invests his entire self in discourse, and this discourse enters into the dialogic fabric of human life, into the world symposium (Bakhtin 1984: 293).

However, all-pervasive as the principle of alterity may be, when it comes to the world of artistic creation, literary fiction is undoubtedly the genre which best embodies the concept of otherness at the heart of this dialogical ethics.4 In “The Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse” Bakhtin highlights the strict connections between literature and language: (…) the novelistic word arose and developed not as the result of a narrowly literary struggle among tendencies, styles, abstract world views - but rather in a complex and centuries-long struggle of cultures and languages. It is connected with the major shifts and crises in the fates of various European languages, and of the speech life of peoples. The prehistory of the novelistic word is not to be contained within the narrow perimeters of a history confined to mere literary styles (Bakhtin 2000 [1988]: 134).

 4

Reflecting on Bakhtin’s praise of Dostoevsky’s skill in constructing novels with a polyphonic texture, Wise (1989) argues that such a trait actually originates from drama.

Literary Fiction: The “Good Bad Book”

23

Although it refuses any strict confinement, “the novelistic word” is deeply grounded in the complex cultural reality of nineteenth-century Russia5 and provides a lens through which the social processes unfolding at that time can be looked at: The objective complexity, contradictoriness and multivoicedness of the epoch in which Dostoevsky lived, the situation of the non-noble intellectual (raznochinec) and social outcast, the profound biographical and inner involvement in the objective multileveledness of life, and, finally, the gift for seeing the world in interaction and coexistence – all these things prepared the soil out of which grew Dostoevsky’s polyphonic novel (Bakhtin 1984: 25).

The “objective complexity, contradictoriness and multivoicedness” Bakhtin refers to in this passage do not seem to be far distant from the complexity of the contemporary world, where the constantly evolving demands of many coexisting ‘others’ clamouring for a voice are certainly the result of a profoundly different social and cultural context – a border, post-modern condition in which the extremisation and the ever-changing nature of agents and events is accelerated by globalisation. However, these characteristics of the contemporary world seem to have produced an even stronger and ever-increasing tendency (1) in the direction of dialogicism and (2) towards a migration of colloquial forms into literary genres.6 This was the soil out of which grew such polyphonic novels as Zadie Smith’s White Teeth in particular, but also N-W (see Table 1), Gautam Malkani’s Londonstani (Table 2), Hanif Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia (Table 3) etc., that certainly offer themselves to the language teacher as a suitable tool to explore the complexities of language in class, just as Dostoevsky’s novels offered themselves to Bakhtin as an effective tool for teaching the Russian language a century ago (Bakhtin 2004 [1997]). Specially when he looks like yours. And he’s so lovely. He’s so lovely your Meeshell. Lovely way about him. Bev, d’you remember when we was round Leah’s that time and my car window weren’t working and Meeshell got on his knees with a wire coat hanger? After I’d been telling Leon about it for a MONTH.

 5

Bakhtin’s account of the multivocality and outsideness of Dostoevsky’s novel is clear evidence of this. 6 This, nonetheless, is not a new phenomenon, as we will show further on in this chapter.

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Chapter Two

He’s proper sensitive. Proper family-orientated. Whenever I’m thinking: where did all the good brothers get to? I think, breathe: at least there’s Meeshell. Yeah but they’re all already taken! HAHAHAHAHAHAHA By the white girls! Nah, don’t be like that. Leah, she’s only messing with you. Don’t mess with Leah! Not her fault Leon’s a useless bastard. Leon’s all right. (Bloody useless. ‘Leon, what you doing tonight?’ ‘Chillin with my man dem.’ He’s always bloody ‘chillin’.) Leon’s all right. Seriously though, you’re lucky. And she gets a blow-dry thrown in! A man who can do your hair. That’s paradise right there. He can do cane row, he can do extensions . . . Kelly, what she need cane row for? She’s not Bo Derek. HA! (Nah, Leah, no offence – sorry that’s funny tho.) I’m talking about he’s a professional. I’m talking about he can do any kind of hair. And he’s straight. Innit! Innit! Hahaha Innit. Yeah. (He best be!) That’s what kills me! Best of both worlds! You have tho. You don’t know you’re born. She doesn’t, she doesn’t know she’s born. You don’t know you’re born. You don’t. You don’t know you’re born. Table 1: Z. Smith 2012, N-W, London: Hamish Hamilton, 31

Ǧ Jus shut yo ugly face, Jas, n stop bein a pussy, I think were his exact words. – We meetin down here cos we def ain’t gonna bump into Tariq or any a his crew here, a’ight. Ǧ Bruv, you’re allowed to see him before a fight. It in’t like you two getting married. Ǧ Fuck u, Jas, yeh. Jus shut da fuck up. Truth is, Hardjit’d just wanted to make sure his entrance to the fight was as dramatic as possible. Table 2: G. Malkani 2007 [2006], Londonstani, London, New York, Toronto and Sydney: Harper Perennial, 85

Literary Fiction: The “Good Bad Book”

25

‘Look,’ I said, turning sharply on her and utilizing advice I'd been given by Charlie about the treatment of women: Keep ’em keen, treat ’em mean. ‘I've got to walk to the bus stop. I don't want to stand here all afternoon being laughed at like a cunt. Where is the person you're waiting for?’ ‘It's you, silly.’ ‘You came to see me?’ ‘Yes. D’you have anything to do this afternoon?’ ‘No, ’course not .’ ‘Be with me, then?’ ‘Yeah, great.’ She took my arm and we walked on together past the schoolboy eyes. Table 3: H. Kureishi 1990, The Buddha of Suburbia, London: Faber and Faber, 7071

Smith’s White Teeth (Table 4) is particularly useful to explore the linguistic background of contemporary London:7 ‘Jackie.’ ‘Irie.’ ‘Pale, sir! Freckles an’ every ting. You Mexican?’ ‘No.’ ‘Half Jamaican. Half English.’ ‘Half-caste,’ Jackie explained patiently. ‘Your mum white?’ ‘Dad.’ Jackie wrinkled her nose. ‘Usually de udder way roun’. How curly is it? Lemme se what’s under dere-’ She made a grab for Irie’s headscarf. Irie, horrified at the possibility of being laid bare in a room full of people, got there before her and held on tight. Jackie sucked her teeth. ‘What d’you ’spec us to do wid it if we kyant see it?’ Table 4: Z. Smith 2001 [2000], White Teeth, London: Penguin, 273-274

In addition to providing evidence for Hall’s argument in favour of the “value of writers who use ordinary language in extraordinary ways” (Hall 2005: 13), the above passages from Smith’s White Teeth and N-W, from



7 For an overview of the language situation of contemporary London, see Cheshire, Kerswill, Fox and Torgersen 2011.

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Chapter Two

Malkani’s Londonstani and from Kureishi’s Buddha Of Suburbia also testify to “the increasing historic trend to use more colloquial or informal language, in literature as in other areas, through the nineteenth century to the present day” (Hall 2005: 19). Recent studies approaching language from different perspectives have in fact provided evidence of a shift in most contemporary written discourse towards ‘orality’ (expository genres being an interesting exception moving towards the opposite extreme), which has been labelled, among other things, as colloquialization (Mair 2006), conversationalization (Fairclough 1994), and informalization (Pearce 2005). Not only is this move “from a distant, impersonal, formal public discourse toward conversation and personalized discourse” true of public communication (Fairclough and Mauranen 1997: 117-118) and popular written discourse (Biber and Finegan 1989 and 2001); it is also true of literary language, particularly British, if one accepts the existence of a “growing divergence between English and American styles of writing, with America providing the conditions – in its system of small presses and campus poets – to foster ongoing experimentalism, while England, with a centralised literary establishment dominated by large publishing houses looking for mass markets, aims at the ‘anti-academic and readable’” (Adamson 1998: 678) – thus basically following the revolution of using “a selection of the language really spoken by men” initiated by the Lyrical Ballads – but actually based on the fact that “what is ‘difficult’ to one generation becomes ‘readable’ to the next and techniques gradually diffuse from ‘high’ and ‘low’ genres of writing” (Adamson 1998: 678). This fact, combined with the characteristic wealth of literary texts, which “typically make use of a wide range of styles, varieties and registers” (Hall 2005: 26), certainly makes room for the literary text (any literary text) in the language class. The inherent dialogicism of fiction hinted at above, combined with its narrative essence (as expanded below), may be the reason why it has always been considered the literary genre par excellence in the language classroom. In a view of literariness as not simply confined to a linguistic phenomenon,8 texts like Smith’s and Kureishi’s (just like Dostoevsky for Bakhtin) can also be re-read through the lens of social semiotics. From such a perspective, the language-culture relationship gets emphasised, expressing itself as discourse (Sarangi 1994); it focuses on ‘small cultures’, on “social processes as they emerge”, on the “composite of cohesive behaviour within any social grouping” (Holliday 1999: 247). The passage from Smith’s

 8

And so still within the Bakhtinian perspective.

Literary Fiction: The “Good Bad Book”

27

White Teeth presented below (Table 5) offers an excellent example of a language game mimicking colonising practices (‘taxing’) which works as a cohesion tool within the multicultural London group of youngsters described: Millat and Magid jumped into action. The practice of ‘taxing’ something, whereby one lays claims, like a newly arrived colonizer, to items in a street that do not belong to you, was well known and beloved to both of them. ‘Cha, man! Believe, I don’t want to tax dat crap,’ said Millat with the Jamaican accent that all kids, whatever their nationality, used to express scorn. ‘I tax dat,’ he said, pointing out an admittedly impressive small, shiny, red MG about to turn the corner. ‘And dat’ he cried, getting there just before Magid as a BMW whizzed past. ‘Man, you know I tax that,’ he said to Magid, who offered no dispute. ‘Blatantly’. Table 5: Z. Smith 2001 [2000], White Teeth, London: Penguin, 167

The following passage from Will Self’s Umbrella (Table 6) is equally interesting from this perspective: The psychiatric nurse and the psychiatrist sit in silent contemplation for a moment, then: Zechariah, Chapter 8, Verse 23. Busner is appalled by it all, and cannot take his eyes off the cross Coptic? that hangs around Mboya’s neck, but Mboya laughs a laugh I haven’t heard before, one that’s warm, companionable, and says, Don’t worry, Zack, the churchgoing is pretty much done with now, I got the cross because Hendrix was wearing one on the cover of one of his albums. Still, you can take the boy out of the mission school. He stuffs the cliché with a mouthful of sandwich, and Busner is momentarily silenced by egg and cress being tumbled in the pink cement mixer, before expostulating, You don’t mean to say you know the entire bloody thing off by heart? Mboya shrugs, No, ’course not – but a good portion, I’m blessed with a pretty near photographic memory. Busner would like to ask Mboya all about himself, there’s much that’s intriguing: his almost accentless English, his air of containment, which is familiar because I share it. Also, he has been at Friern for over a decade, he must know a lot… Instead Busner says: I want to photograph the postencephalitic patients, will you help me? And Mboya drops one heavy eyelid over a bloodshot white. He’s tired, Busner thinks, we’re all tired – like we’re all ravenous. Mboya sucks his cheek, chk-chk, shutter clucks. – D’you want me to use my memory, Zack, because I do remember most of

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them –. No, no, Busner begins in all seriousness. I have a 35-millimetre and a Bolex for cine films . . . then he realises: You’re teasing me! And this is the most pleasingly intimate thing that has happened to him in a long time, to be teased. Teasing him is what Miriam did when they were first together, and this gentle ridicule somehow annulled all the grosser abuse he had suffered at boarding school – the anti-Semitic taunts, his underpants torn from him in the changing room, Henry quite powerless to intervene . . . She doesn’t tease him any more, though – she has modulated her critique into humiliation. Busner pushes his plate to one side, he begins to roll and then unroll the end of his tie once Maurice’s, which is heavy, knitted silk, one of the few left. Table 6: W. Self 2012, Umbrella, London: Bloomsbury, 116-117

Pursuing the literature/social semiotics nexus, with a view to native literature, foreign literature (and comparative literature) as cultural studies, such themes as the ones dealt with by authors like Smith, Malkani, Kureishi, Self and many more (class, appropriation, racial and gender difference, and so on) are rightly within the scope of investigation, as in such a view “culture becomes a term progressively emptied of meaning by coming more and more to include everything in human life” (Miller 1999: 509): Leah is as faithful in her allegiance to this two-mile square of the city as other people are to their families, or their countries. She knows the way people speak around here, that fuckin, around here, is only a rhythm in a sentence. She arranges her face to signify compassion. Shar closes her eyes, nods. She makes quick movements with her mouth, inaudible, speaking to herself. To Leah she says – You’re so good. (…) Leah directs Shar to the kitchen. Big hands on the girl’s narrow shoulders. She watches Shar’s buttocks rise up and against her rolled-down jogging pants, the little downy dip in her back, pronounced, sweaty in the heat. The tiny waist opening out into curves. Leah is hipless, gangly like a boy. Perhaps Shar needs money. Her clothes are not clean. In the back of her right knee there is a wide tear in the nasty fabric. Dirty heels rise up out of disintegrating flip-flops. She smells. – Heart attack! I was asking them is she dyin? Is she dyin? Is she dyin? She goes in the ambulance – don’t get no answer do I! I got three kids that is home alone innit – I have to get hospital – what they talking about car

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for? I ain’t got no car! I’m saying help me – no one did a fuckin thing to help me. Leah grips Shar’s wrist, sets her down in a chair at the kitchen table and passes over a roll of tissue. She puts her hands once more on Shar’s shoulders. Their foreheads are inches from each other. – I understand, it’s OK. Which hospital? – It’s like… I ain’t written it… In Middlesex or – Far, though. Don’t know eggzak’ly. Table 7: Z. Smith 2012, N-W, London: Hamish Hamilton, 6

Marcus clears his throat, her-herg-h’herm, a lengthy and complacent gurgle. I came, he says glutinously, specifically to see my Miss Deerth, may we do that now? For what we see is what we choose, What we keep or what we lose for-èver… Sometimes, Busner thinks, the pop singers put it best, and to Marcus he is caustic: Death – she prefers her given name, now she’s come back to life… Don’t – let – it – die, Don’t let it die–ie– ie… Why, Busner wonders, am I quite so plagued by these tapeworms spooling through my mind? Is it my unconscious ventriloquising through Hurricane Smith? And there’s no thunder without lightning… Table 8: W. Self 2012, Umbrella, London: Bloomsbury, 239

These texts also contribute to offering an interesting representation of present-day complexity, which is well embodied in the multi-faceted contemporary metropolises, populated as they are by composite, evershifting forms of identity which are racially, linguistically, culturally or religiously (and sometimes all at once) hybrid. They effectively illustrate the many different ways in which nowadays otherness increasingly populates the centre rather than the margins of society.

2.1.2 Narrativity as the essence of the human being We suggested above (§ 1.4) that literature can be used as a tool to raise motivation, involvement and emotive response, provided that the concept of literature is ‘humanized’. From the perspective of ‘humanizing’ literature in terms of making it both more human and more humane, we cannot but include the view of literary fiction as narrative, that is to say, the most common way in which human beings make sense of events, experiences

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and life as a whole.9 Interest in narrative is not a recent phenomenon. Narratologie (Todorov 1969) began in its modern form in the first half of the twentieth century (Propp 1968 [1928]) but can be said to have been around ever since Aristotle’s Poetics. However, nowadays this interest has widened to the point of becoming a proper theoretical perspective, a lens through which other areas of study can be scrutinised. In emphasising the pervasiveness of narrative in our culture, narrative theory (the name change is obviously no minor matter) no longer limits itself to analysing the underlying structures of narrative; its prime objective is to uncover the ways in which narratives both shape the representation of reality and influence people’s interpretation of it, thus unmasking the structures (conscious or unconscious) and value judgements people build into their narratives. Narrative is in fact a basic human strategy for coming to terms with life. Stories are central to human existence. In Hall’s words: “Narrative is a pre-eminent genre, or ‘super-genre’, because it informs so much of our linguistic, cognitive and social activity, interaction and development” (Hall 2005: 32; also Toolan 1988). While narrative is undoubtedly the basic component of fictional works (novels, novellas, short stories, flash fiction and the like), recent studies (Biber 1988) have analysed the ‘typical’ linguistic features of some literary genres, providing, amongst other things, scientific evidence for the narrative nature of fiction (its high degree of ‘narrativity’). All literary works10 include a certain degree of narrativity but differ in terms of narrative methods, and this affects the degree: for example, whereas the narrativity of fiction is mainly achieved through recounting (i.e. told, mediated by the discursive activity of a narrator), in drama it is mainly realised in dialogue form (see Landa and Onega 1996). When using literary fiction in the language classroom, it is worth remembering that texts with a high degree of narrativity tend to be more memorable as well as more comprehensible than other text-types (Hall 2005: 106). We will explore the topic in greater depth in § 2.2.2, expanding on the concept of first-person narratives and linking this up with both personality building and preparation for community membership, as well as drawing on the idea of literature as a repertoire of ‘action possibilities’. This sec-

 9

This is due to the fact that “narrativization is one of the commonest ways of applying an order and a perspective to experience” (Landa and Onega 1996: 4). 10 Actually, not just literary works: “Today, narratology studies the narrative aspects of many literary and non-literary genres and discourses which need not be defined as strictly narrative, such as lyrical poems, film, drama, history, advertisements” (Landa and Onega 1996: 3).

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tion was conceived as a ‘taster’ for crucial issues to be dealt with later on, after a reflection on the issue of creativity for language learning purposes.

2.1.3 Meaning-making, creativity and ‘doing’ in ordinary language and in literature The re-appropriation of literature in the language classroom is also linked to a view of creativity as an appropriate descriptor of the linguistically deviant (and, as such, as a more suitable label when referring to a phenomenon that actually encompasses both literary and everyday discourse).11 In § 1.5 we discussed the fact that the literary text is often looked upon as not easily accessible, which is in turn ascribed to the ‘difficult’ nature of literary language, while the latter is actually just ‘unusual’, ‘odd’ or simply ‘deviant’. Moreover, we have argued that stressing the ‘alien’ in literary texts only contributes to increasing the students’ “sense of frustration, inferiority and even powerlessness” (Lazar 2010 [1993]: 3) when they are faced with such texts. Work on a literary text should involve an approach not unlike the one used with other texts. The status of the text as literary should not be overstressed; rather, it should be perceived by the student as one of the possible resources providing language activities which can be interesting and stimulating, as well as an occasion to investigate aspects that are not frequently touched upon in literature classes, such as, for example, the creative nature of language tout court, the multilayered nature of meaning and the need for the reader’s active participation in all meaning-making. As regards this last aspect, it is worth emphasising that, with few exceptions,12 literary texts have always been granted the exclusive quality of encouraging readers to take an aesthetic stance, thus enabling them to ‘experience’ the text, as opposed to taking an efferent stance, which serves the purpose of extracting factual information from the text (Spiegel 1998; for the aesthetic/efferent opposition, see Rosenblatt 1983 [1938], as well as § 1.2). In Green’s words: “(…) language causes feelings, produces emotions and moves people. When we read a work of literature, for example, it is not some mental representation that enables us to feel the way we do, it is the power of words” (Green 2000: 66). ‘Experiencing’ a text is tantamount to creating ‘unique’, personal meaning grounded in that text (there-

 11 Cfr § 1.5 above and Chapter 3. 12

For example see Alexander 1997; Spires and Donley 1998, who argue that the capacity of stimulating an aesthetic stance should be extended to texts other than literary.

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by producing as many interpretations of that text as there are readers), which in turn is crucial in helping the student to reflect on the reader’s active role in the meaning-making of all texts, not just literary ones. In turn, the issue of ‘experiencing’ texts brings two more considerations to mind, which are critical in this context, but cannot be explored further: the need for a perspective shift in the didactics of reading from teaching comprehension to promoting comprehension and the added value of literature in terms of encouraging (reading) experience transfer. As Henderson and Buskist put it: Keene (2008) reminds readers that one’s understanding of a text can take many forms and reach various levels and that seldom do teachers do the types of things that they ask of their students. If we honor the idea that every student brings to the reading event individual experiences that will impact their understanding of the text under consideration, then we must also agree that comprehension will vary as a result of those experiences. Therefore, we cannot teach comprehension, as it is an invisible process that takes place in the head of the reader. However, we can promote comprehension in ways that will not only facilitate the comprehension of the text under consideration but will readily transfer to other texts undertaken by the reader and enhance literary understandings (Henderson and Buskist 2011: 233).

In § 1.4 above we have already highlighted the way in which literature can be a booster for creativity. Amongst others, Carter 2002, 2004; Carter and McCarthy 1995, 2001 [1995]; O’Keefe, McCarthy and Carter 2007 have shown how rich in linguistic creativity ordinary language is, and at the same time have argued that this aspect could be usefully exploited in the language class: “Creativity is an everyday, demotic phenomenon, (…) it is endemic in spoken interaction, and that has been generally underplayed within the language teaching classroom” (O’Keefe, McCarthy and Carter 2007: 197). This attitude is in line with Tannen’s invitation to move away from such terms as “oral strategies” and “literate strategies” in order to discourage a purely oppository attitude towards features that are in fact common to both orality and literacy and account for “variation in all forms of discourse, including conversation” (Tannen 1985: 124). The fact that creativity actually cuts across written and spoken modes rather than being an aspect of literary texts alone, though it is commonly identified with the latter and widely exploited in class to this end, is evidence of how literature could easily lend itself to boosting the development of creativity in the language class via skill transfer. An article by Bakhtin (republished in English quite recently: 2004 [1997]) shows that

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the Russian scholar was ahead of his time in recognising the link between creativity in literature and in everyday language. In this article, Bakhtin emphasises the central role of study on the language of literary works, in which the very presence of a number of characters already presupposes the existence of dialogic relations. In stressing how important it is to teach students to use language creatively for everyday uses (as well as for academic purposes), he argues that the language samples provided by literature are crucial to teach how to strive for creativity in personal language productions: “Teaching syntax without providing stylistic elucidation and without attempting to enrich the students’ own speech lacks any creative significance and does not help them improve the creativity of their own speech productions (…)” (Bakhtin 2004 [1997]: 15). As the editor of the aforementioned article explains, despite often focusing on single sentences, Bakhtin’s main concern was always with the whole, not just artistic but also world-related context: “Bakhtin (…) pays attention to the real-world context of the artistic works from which these sentences were taken. In other words, in actuality, he analyzes these sentences as whole utterances or as components of a particular utterance known to the students” (Gogotishvili in Bakhtin 2004 [1997]: 38). Bakhtin also stresses another important aspect of the issue: the potential for enjoyment of stylistic analyses in which the students are asked to intervene as active participants is directly proportional to the boredom the same students seem to experience when required to do grammar analysis; moreover, stylistic analyses “give grammar meaning for the students (…)” (Bakhtin 2004 [1997]: 23). Bakhtin’s description of the stages Russian students’ written language went through in his times seems to match what happens today within most European students’ learning paths: in the low grades there seems to be “no sharp distinction between the students’ written and oral language”, and their written production – “although somewhat clumsy” – is consequently “lively, concrete, and emotional. Their written syntax is close to that of speech and they are not yet overly concerned with the correctness of their grammar. They thus construct rather bold sentences, which, at times, can be very expressive” (Bakhtin 2004 [1997]: 23). Then a radical change seems to take place almost naturally: Students begin to write in a self-consciously literary and bookish style. (…) But under their inexperienced pens the language of the textbooks becomes even more clichéd and depersonalized. The students begin to fear any original expression, any turn of phrase that does not resemble the clichés in their books. They write for the eyes and do not go over what they have written by reading aloud using intonation and gesture. Their lan-

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Bakhtin stresses the importance of using literature to give “students a good preventive vaccination against the disease of childhood they are facing – self-conscious bookishness of written language[;] (…) bringing the students out of the dead-end of bookishness onto the thoroughfare of the literate, cultured, and, at the same time, bold and creative language of real life” (Bakhtin 2004 [1997]: 24). He is well aware of the crucial, long-term trickle-down effect of this study of language through literature on the student, in terms of wholeperson formation: After all, language has a powerful effect on the thought processes of the person who generates it. Creative, original, exploratory thought that is in contact with the richness and complexity of life cannot develop on a substrate consisting of the forms of depersonalized, clichéd, abstract, bookish language. The further fate of a student’s creative potential, to a great extent, depends on the language he takes with him out of high school. And this is the instructor’s responsibility (Bakhtin 2004 [1997]: 24).

The topic of creativity is going to be further expanded upon in Chapter 3. Here we are going to further explore Bakhtin’s attention to the real-world context of the artistic works he exploited in his language classes by investigating his analysis of the sentences present in such works as utterances. This means opening up a window on ‘literature as doing’, that is, on a view of the literary text as a speech event, which again helps to position literature tout court properly in the light of language. Though Austin expels literature from the domain of speech acts as a parasitic etiolation of language (Austin 1962: 22), Derrida and de Man, in different ways, challenge this position (and his speech act theory in general) (Miller 2001). In particular, Derrida’s concept of ‘iterability’, i.e. the possibility of repeating a text, which means that the speaker’s intentions are never fully present in a speech act, combined with the French philosopher’s stress on the distinctiveness of every individual speech act, actually turn all speech acts into literature (Derrida 1988 [1977]). In an analysis of King Lear Valesio identifies “the link between the politics of the text and the politics of society” (Valesio 1980: 59) and proves that rhetoric is a dimension of all human discourse. By contrast, Miller singles out three ways of doing things with words which may be

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“identified in connection with literature as conduct” (Miller 2005: 2), the first one being the most relevant in view of the literary text as a vehicle for language learning: “‘Speech acts in literature’ can mean speech acts that are uttered within literary works, for example promises, lies, excuses, declarations, imprecations, requests for forgiveness, apologies, pardons, and the like said or written by the characters or by the narrator in a novel” (Miller 2001: 1). The second way of doing things with words in a literary context consists in identifying the literary work taken as a whole as a possible performative: writing a novel may be a way of doing things with words, this being “part of the conduct of life” (Miller 2005: 2). The third way stems from a similar view of teaching or doing literary criticism: Teaching, or writing criticism, or just talking about a book is a doing that may do other things in its turn. My title, “Literature as Conduct,” can refer to the way writing literature is a form of conduct, or to the representation of conduct within literary fictions, or, using conduct as a verb, to the way literature may conduct its readers to believe or to behave in new ways (Miller 2005: 2).

2.1.4 The ‘expressiveness’ issue in ‘realistically contrived’ language In the following pages we look at different ways of representing and expressing conducts, behaviours, identities etc. through literature suitable for exploitation in the language classroom, whether such literature be ‘authentic’ or not, in line with what we posited in § 1.4. As previously mentioned (§ 2.1.1), Smith’s novels are particularly useful for their expression of the linguistic background of contemporary London. Gautam Malkani’s novel Londonstani also explores the socio-linguistic milieu of multicultural London, but from a completely different perspective since it presents the world of British Asian ‘rudeboys’ through the eyes of a teenager who – as we only discover in the last few pages – is actually white. Whereas the language of White Teeth is an attempt to reproduce the linguistic reality of multiethnic, multicultural and polyphonic London, the language of Londonstani openly mimics the way in which non-mainstream groups appropriate and parody ‘proper’ English: “the young men express their disrespect for mainstream society by carefully pulping the English language” (Malkani n.d.). Also, the subversive effect of creolisation is amplified through the visual artifice of textspeak. This is evident from the outset, in the book’s very first lines (Table 9):

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Serve him right he got his muthafuckin face fuck’d, shudn’t b callin me a Paki, innit. After spittin his words out Hardjit stopped for a second, like he expected us to write em down or someshit. Then he sticks in an exclamation mark by kickin the white kid in the face again. – Shudn’t b callin us Pakis, innit, u dirty gora. Again, punctuation came with a kick, but with his left foot this time so it was more like a semicolon. – Call me or any ma bredrens a Paki again an I’ma mash u and yo family. In’t dat da truth, Pakis? Table 9: G. Malkani 2007 [2006], Londonstani, London, New York, Toronto and Sydney: Harper Perennial, 6

The fake slang used by “wannabe bad-boys” alternates with Panjabi dialogue “spelt the local way rather than the British ‘Punjabi’” and “[t]he bulk of the book’s language is basically a mash-up of London street slang; popular Americanisms (such as “feds” or “bucks”); Panjabi slang and hiphop slang” (Malkani n.d.), the reason for the mélange being well expressed by the author, who intentionally strives for “a kind of futureproof, timeless slang – instead of taking a snapshot at any particular moment in time”: What I didn’t want to do was capture an exact picture of the way people talk by writing it just as I was hearing it. That would’ve been dumbassingly pointless because slang changes all the time and words and phrases would’ve been out of date by the time the book was published (if indeed it ever got published). So instead, I tried to create a timeless version of the slang so that more people could recognise and relate to it regardless of what year they finished school (Malkani n.d.).

Interestingly enough, the slang used throughout the book is also deliberately tailored to the different characters in order to create consistent identities: “For example, Jas always says ‘in’t’ instead of ‘ain’t’ – which purposely shows how Jas tries too hard to be a bad-boy while Hardjit is comfortable and secure using the British mainstream slang ‘ain’t’” (Malkani n.d.). This attention to idiosyncrasy and realistic detail within the use of contrived language may seem paradoxical and not fit to be used for language learning ends, and yet the author’s explanation of the reasons behind that paradox actually shows this is not the case: The point is, the slang isn’t random. There are rules and codes with all slang – otherwise slang wouldn’t create boundaries and barriers to entry. And in the case of this particular slang, it creates both a racial boundary

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and a generational boundary. So, just, [sic] like every other aspect of the characters’ identities, their seemingly random slang is actually carefully constructed and contrived (Malkani n.d.).

The interest (and possible uses) of both Malkani’s text and the comments on his language choices in favour of the ‘realistically contrived’ in the language classroom must be self-evident.13 In addressing Blake’s dismissal of the existence of linguistic realism in literature (1981), Mair resorts to a “higher plane of linguistic realism”: The writer is not a transcriber but – to venture a rather daring comparison – in the same position as the children of Caribbean immigrants living in London described by LePage and Tabouret-Keller (1986: 244-6). To these young people the Creolised English of their parents is no longer a native language, but a linguistic repertoire they draw on consciously and selectively – for example in order to give symbolic expression to their disaffection with mainstream society. (…) It is an artefact, made up of real fragments much like collages in the visual arts. It defies description from the linguist’s point of view because it violates his tacit assumption that one speaker/narrator has one voice, and it is difficult for the literary scholar to describe because, in a discipline where the greater part of effort and ingenuity have gone into developing ways of speaking about writers’ personal stylistic idiosyncrasies, it is difficult to account for effects which are achieved by imitating the speech of others or transposing what people say into a different context (Mair 1992: 105-106).

Mair’s “higher plane” well accounts for the contemporary issue of ‘mediation’ and the simultaneous processes of standardisation and destandardisation generated both by globalisation and by the pervasive power of new technology. A similarly contrived and schizophrenic linguistic métissage as that found in Londonstani is present in Will Self’s The Book of Dave, which tells the story of Dave Rudman, a psychotic London taxi-driver. It could profitably be exploited to foster reflection on the linguistic (and cultural) phenomenon of hyper-awareness in post-colonial, diasporic communities constantly reworking their multiple belongings, where what is in fact true of all language choices is particularly pertinent: they are never naïve, as language is always political.

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This again links back to what has already been argued in § 1.4 about authenticity. Recently calls have been made to re-address and re-think the whole question of linguistic authenticity in sociolinguistics, with ‘real language’ coming to be seen as an increasingly dubious notion (Coupland 2007).

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Most of the dialogues in the book are written in Mokni, an invented dialect of English which is a crossover of Cockney and taxi-driver English, and the main character’s personal usage of this language also incorporates some features of textspeak (Table 10). ‘Vares nuffin nú unnersun, mì sun.’ The Fare spoke the broadest of cockney, vowels crushed to death by rumbling lorries on the Mile End Road. ‘Doan ask wy ve ol daze wuz bé-er van vese, coz U aynt gó ve nous fer í. Lemme tellya, no geezer az a fukkin clú abaht iz oan tyme, yeah? Ees juss lyke a fukkin sparrer –’ ‘The sparrows are nearly all gone in London.’ Dave put in. ‘Eggzackerly!’ In the rearview mirror Dave saw the old man’s bony digit waggle ‘Eggzackerly, lyke a fukkin sparer aw a bitta bá-erred cod.’ ‘They’re going inall.’ ‘Rì agen, gawn, cort inna eevul fukkin net mayt, an eevul fukkin net vat juss cum aht uv ve fukkin sky.’ Table 10: W. Self, 2006, The Book of Dave, London: Bloomsbury, 167-168

2.2. What books in the language classroom? or How to explore Young Adult Literature for language learning 2.2.1 The crucial role of choice Research following the alarm launched by the International Reading Association about a “deepening crisis in adolescent literacy” (Moore, Bean, Birdyshaw and Rycik 1999: 1) seems to point to the existence of a correlation between student choice and a growing interest in reading, even amongst low-achieving readers (Guthrie and Anderson 1999; Allington and McGill-Franzen 2003) as well as to the wide range of texts young people daily ‘choose’ to read (i.e. are not simply ‘exposed’ to), including e-mails, websites, text messages, and blogs.14 Recent research also provides evidence that Young Adult (YA) Literature occupies a central role, “fiction being the favourite pick” (Koss and Teale 2009: 563) in the lives of teenagers. Another good indicator of the popularity of YA Literature is the (relatively recent) introduction of such awards as the Michael L.

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Without forgetting school – or academic – texts; Anderson, Wilson and Fielding 1998; Moore, Bean, Birdyshaw and Rycik 1999; Reeves 2004; Worthy, Moorman and Turner 1999.

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Printz award in the USA (Best YA book of the year), and of the Young Australian Readers’ Award (YARA, a readers’ choice award). A quick glance at the general topics of most YA Literature (Table 11: the data refers to the U.S. market, but it could probably be extended to other countries) could easily explain the reason for this preference: Subject matter Finding themselves Searching for answers/secrets Finding identity/hiding self Dealing with loss Friendship Family Coming of age Bullying Moving Relationships Abuse Illness/mental issue

Number (percentage) 50 (85%) 20 (34%) 20 (34%) 20 (34%) 31 (53%) 30 (51%) 16 (27%) 21 (36%) 20 (34%) 19 (32%) 12 (20%) 15 (25%)

Table 11: M.D. Koss and W.H. Teale 2009, “What’s Happening in YA Literature? Trends in Books for Adolescents”, Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy 52 (7), 567

Of the three dimensions of literature (cognitive, emotional, social) identified in Andringa 1991, we believe this type of book particularly stresses the “emotional dimension, containing the aspects of emotional engagement, identification, affective response” (Andringa 1991: 157). It “allows teens to play with their identities in a safe and controlled manner, and to explore who they want to be in this ever-changing world” (Koss and Teale 2009: 569). As Henderson and Buskist suggest: “These books are rife with themes that adolescents find engaging. Teachers who understand the role motivation and reading volume plays in increasing students’ reading achievement, strive to include YAL into their classroom curriculum” (Henderson and Buskist 2011: 231). We feel that this can easily be extended to language learning in general, as can the following reflection: YAL provides teachers and students with a powerful medium for constructing understanding and promoting the comprehension processes necessary for skilful reading. Because the themes and content are relevant and interesting to adolescents, YAL stimulates meaningful discussions during

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Chapter Two which teachers can model what skilful readers do and scaffold students’ construction of comprehension processes. The goal is not only to deepen students’ understandings of the current text, but to provide opportunities whereby the students internalize the processes so they are able to apply them when reading independently (Henderson and Buskist 2011: 237).

This clearly points to the need to widen the range of literary texts on the teacher’s reading list. Incidentally, the suggestion is also in line with the need to ‘humanise’ literature in the language class as stated in §1.5, where we argued that not only should all texts be dealt with via the same approach, but also that literary texts should be chosen irrespective of a particular ‘canon’. Ever since the literary theory wars of the 70s and 80s, the distinction between high and popular culture has in fact no longer been tenable. Indeed, some scholars of the past were already much closer to contemporary readers in the scope of their reading choices than we could possibly imagine today: Johnson (…) read in a multiplicity of areas, including popular writing. Milton knew a great many books also, but few can match Johnson in his catholicity. His taste for romances and fairy tales (the latter of which he also wrote) has already been mentioned; he also read widely in religion, theology, philosophy, history, law, language, literature, numismatics, science, medicine, geography, travel, education, economics, biography, and what we would term popular crafts. He was, in his practices, far closer to the modern popular reader than to the modern scholarly reader (Schwartz 1997: 43).

Again, literary fiction is crucial in this regard, since “[c]aring nothing for the division between good and bad literature, narrative is international, transhistorical, transcultural: it is simply there, like life itself” (Barthes 1977 [1966]: 79). The texts that students tend to choose when left free to do so seem to belong – at least those that can be classified as print publications – to what could probably be labelled as “good bad books”, an expression which Orwell (1945) borrowed from Chesterton to refer to writings that lacked the high-brow cultural pretensions of ‘great’ literature. In Orwell’s time, Uncle Tom’s Cabin counted as a good bad book, as did Sherlock Holmes and Dracula. If we were to apply Orwell’s category to contemporary literature, maybe such British novels as those by Hornby and Coe would count as “good bad books”, along with those by Brizzi and Ammaniti in Italian literary production. Our point is that the door should be kept open even for more evidently noncanonical reads, i.e. for the type of books that very

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many people turn to as some sort of ‘guilty pleasure’, being widely condemned as culturally and academically disreputable. We could support our point through reference to the shift from Jakobson’s popularization of the idea of literaturnost as the legitimate subject of literary scholarship, and the Russian Formalists’ idea of ostranenie (via Mukarovsky’s idea of “foregrounding”) as the characterising feature of the literary text, to the postmodern critical examination of the concept of literariness and its view of literary texts as being on a par with any other text. However, we have chosen not to do so. Nor are we going to touch on the issue of literariness as a socially-constructed phenomenon or the consequent locus shift of literariness from the text to the reader, which would in fact quite easily justify our choice of texts in terms of awareness of the student’s common tendency to view literature “with literature-seeing eyes”15 merely because s/he encounters it in academic contexts. We are not going to rely on such arguments because this is not only beyond the scope of this book but above all beyond our specific competence. However, as the points outlined in Chapter 1 and pursued in the present chapter should show, we have clearly taken on board a wider vision of literariness than more traditional standpoints would allow for, as well as an interest in the reader’s response to texts. The following statements also prompt further reflection: “Over the past decade adolescents have been one of the fastest growing segments of the U.S. population” (Magazine Publishers of America, 2004; U.S. Census Bureau, 2003). And “[t]he numbers of books published for young adults, ages 13-19, have grown extensively in recent years (Bean 2003; Donelson and Nilsen 2005; Horning, Lingren, Rudiger and Schliesman 2004), and new YA imprints specifically for more mature teen readers have appeared, such as Edge, Push, and Speak” (Koss and Teale 2009: 563). Likewise, it would be worth focusing on other types of reading materials designed for young adults, in particular websites, magazines, and graphic novels; but again this is beyond the scope of this book and we will only concentrate on YA Literature here.



15 The reference here is to Fish’s anecdote of using a list of names written vertically on the blackboard (as a reading assignment to the previous class) as an assignment in reading (to the class that follows), which sees students develop an ingenious series of interpretations of the name list produced, not because students can recognise poetry when they see it, but rather because they see poetry when they know it is poetry (Fish 1980). The literary text does not exist a priori; it is generated by the reader’s interpretations.

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2.2.2 Aspects of Young Adult Literature In this section we focus on some aspects of Young Adult literature which are particularly relevant for language learning, and we will do so initially with reference to the Italian context, which we know best, and later to a more widely known (and read) type of books, which is however usually frowned upon despite, we believe, constituting many young adults’ favourite picks. Italian contemporary narrative is partly still attached to a traditional ideal of literature as an exercise in good writing. Carmen Covito, a writer herself, has often voiced her worries about the lack of vitality of contemporary Italian narrative: (I)f I examine the landscape of contemporary Italian literature, I see two types of writers (...). On the one hand there are the lettered writers who have not yet realized that spoken Italian has indeed become the standard national language. They do not see, they do not hear, they know nothing about spoken Italian as a standard national language. They would ask: what is it? dare not interfere! do not bother us! let us work! As a matter of fact, essi (or “they”: today only a lettered writer would use egli, ella, and essi [he, she, they] with no intent of irony; all other writers would instead use the oblique pronouns lui, lei and loro [him, her, them] in place of their corresponding subject pronouns) – essi, therefore, continue to write in a canonically accepted literary language, at times even courtly, and possibly vague, because from the Petrarchists on down vague equals refined. And if it is not possible to be vague, then at least the language can be neutral, smoothed out, depilated and deodorized, deprived of any sign and smell of life. Extremists in this group of writers make themselves authentic virtuosos of variatio on Nothing. They are epigones of Manganelli and admirers of Citati. They are lovers of the most deleterious divinity ever created by the genius of Italic inconsistency: the “beautifully written page” (Covito 1997: 310).16

Covito recognizes that “(t)here are also some younger writers like Nove, Ammaniti, and Brizzi, whose stylistic use of the spoken language is a conscious choice coherent with their themes, almost always based on juvenile motifs and written with the structural rhythms often associated with rock music or TV channel surfing” (Covito 1997: 311). She is not convinced this is the right choice, either, as she favours “a third path situated halfway between deaf-and-dumb literariness and the indiscriminate predominance of the standard spoken language” (312). Covito’s words show how relevant this aspect of “indiscriminate predominance of the standard spoken

 16

Translated by Francesca Novello, revised by the author.

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language”, typical of at least some of young adult literature, is for the language class. Gloria si sollevò e gli mise un braccio intorno al collo. «Quanto vuoi scommettere che non ti ci faccio più pensare?». Pietro accennò un sorriso. «E come?». Lei gli prese una mano. «Facciamoci un bagno, ti va?». «Un bagno?! No, non mi va. Non ne ho voglia per niente.» «Forza, l’acqua sarà caldissima.» Lo prese per un braccio. Alla fine Pietro si mise in piedi e si fece trascinare sul bagnasciuga. Anche se c’era solo una mezzaluna, la notte era luminosa. Le stelle arrivavano fin dentro il mare piatto come una tavola. Non c’erano rumori se si escludeva lo sciabordio dell’acqua che smuoveva la sabbia. Tra le dune alle loro spalle la vegetazione formava un groviglio nero punteggiato dalle luci intermittenti delle lucciole. «Io mi butto, se non lo fai pure tu sei uno stronzo.» Gloria si tolse la maglietta di fronte a Pietro. Aveva i seni piccoli e così pallidi rispetto al resto del corpo abbronzato. Gli lanciò un sorriso malizioso e poi si voltò, si sfilò pantaloncini e mutande e urlando si gettò in acqua. Si è spogliata davanti a me. «È bellissima! È caldissima. Forza, vieni! Ti devo pregare in ginocchio?» Gloria si mise in ginocchio e congiunse le mani. «Pietruccio, Pietruccio, ti prego, fai il bagnetto con me?» E lo diceva con una voce… Sei scemo? Vai, forza, che aspetti? Pietro si tolse la maglietta, si sfilò i pantaloncini e, in mutande, si gettò nell’acqua. Il mare era caldo, ma non tanto da non dargli una sferzata che gli ripulì la stanchezza che aveva addosso. Prese un respiro grande e s’immerse nell’acqua bassa e cominciò a nuotare vigorosamente a rana a dieci centimetri dal fondo sabbioso. Ora doveva solo nuotare. Spingere sempre di più, seguire il fondale fino al largo, come una manta o una razza, fino a quando non avesse avuto più aria a sufficienza, fino a quanto i polmoni gli fossero scoppiati come palloncini. Aprì gli occhi. E c’erano le tenebre fredde, ma continuò a spingere a occhi aperti e cominciava a sentire il bisogno di respirare, fregatene, vai avanti, che gli azzannava il torace, la trachea, la gola, ancora cinque bracciate e, quando le ebbe fatte, si disse che ne poteva fare altre cinque, come minimo sette, sennò era una merda, e stava per sentirsi male ma ne doveva fare ancora dieci, come minimo dieci e ne fece una, due, tre, quatto, cinque, e a quel punto si sentì veramente come se dentro gli esplodesse una bomba nucleare e riemerse boccheggiando. Era lontano

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dalla riva. Ma non così tanto come si era immaginato. Vide la testa bionda di Gloria che girava a destra e a sinistra cercandolo «Gl…» ma poi tacque. Saltava preoccupata. «Pietro? Dove sei? Non fare il cretino, per favore. Dove sei?» Gli ritornò in mente la canzone che la professoressa stava ascoltando quando era nel bagno. Sei bellissima! Ti diceva sei bellissima. Gloria, sei bellissima. Gli sarebbe piaciuto dirglielo. Non ne aveva mai avuto il coraggio. Queste cose non si dicono. S’immerse e fece qualche metro. Quando riemerse, le era più vicino. «Pietro! Pietro, mi stai mettendo paura! Dove sei?». Era nel panico. S’immerse di nuovo e le fu alle spalle. «Pietro! Pietro!» La afferrò alla vita. Lei fece un salto, si girò. «Stronzo! Vaffanculo! Mi hai fatto morire di paura! Ho pensato…» «Cosa?» «Niente! Che sei un cretino.» Prese a schizzargli addosso l’acqua, poi gli saltò addosso. Cominciarono a lottare. Ed era una cosa terribilmente piacevole. I seni contro la schiena. Il sedere. Le cosce. Lei lo spinse sotto e gli si avvinghiò con le gambe contro il bacino. «Chiedi pietà, maledetto!» «Pietà!» Rise Pietro. «Uno scherzetto.» «Bello scherzetto! Usciamo, che mi sto congelando.» Corsero sulla spiaggia e si gettarono, uno vicino all’altra, dove la sabbia era ancora calda. Gloria cominciò a strofinarlo per asciugarlo, ma poi avvicinò la bocca all’orecchio e sospirò: «Mi dici una cosa?» «Cosa?» «Ma tu mi vuoi bene?» «…Sì.» Rispose Pietro. Il cuore aveva cominciato a marciargli sotto lo sterno. «Come mi vuoi bene?» «Tanto.» «No, voglio dire, tu…» Prese un respiro imbarazzata. «Mi ami?» Pausa. «Sì.» Pausa. «Veramente?» «Credo di sì.» «Come la Palmieri? Ti uccideresti per me?»

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«Se fossi in pericolo di vita….» «Allora facciamolo…» «Cosa?» «L’amore. Facciamo l’amore.» «Quando?» «Dopodomani. Quanto sei scemo! Ora, adesso. Io non l’ho mai fatto, tu… Tu non l’hai mai fatto…» fece una smorfia. «Non mi dire che l’hai fatto. Non è che, senza dirlo a nessuno, lo hai fatto con quel mostro della Marrese?» «L’avrai fatto tu con la Marrese…» protestò Pietro. «Sì, sono lesbica e non te l’ho mai detto. Amo la Marrese.» Cambiò tono, divenne seria. «Dobbiamo farlo adesso. Non sarà difficile?» «Non lo so. Ma come…?» Pausa. «Come cosa?» «Come incominciamo?» Gloria alzò gli occhi alla notte e poi, impacciata. «Be’, per esempio potresti baciarmi. Sono già tutta nuda.» Fu una piccola tragedia di cui è meglio non raccontare i particolari. Fu brevissimo, complicato e incompleto e li lasciò pieni di domande e timori, scombussolati, incapaci di parlarne e avvinghiati come gemelli siamesi. Ma poi lei disse: «Mi devi giurare una cosa, Pietro. Me lo devi giurare sul nostro amore. Giura che non lo racconterai mai a nessuno della Palmieri. Mai. Giuramelo.» Pietro rimase in silenzio. «Giuramelo.» «Te lo giuro. Te lo giuro.» «Te lo giuro anch’io. Non lo dirò a nessuno. Nemmeno tra dieci anni. Mai.» «Tu pure devi giurarmi una cosa, che rimarremo sempre amici, che non ci lasceremo mai, anche se io sarò in seconda e tu in terza.» «Te lo giuro.» Table 12: N. Ammaniti 2012 [1999], Ti prendo e ti porto via, Milano: Mondadori, 419-422

The text in Table 12, taken from Niccolò Ammaniti’s Ti prendo e ti porto via, stands out as potentially very attractive for a young reader (hence the length of the excerpt we have quoted) due to its themes: the young people’s first encounter with sex, but also their relationships with society,

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family, school and people their age. It looks exactly like the type of text that could be used to spur students to read outside the academic context. Moreover, the text easily lends itself to use in language activities aimed at raising the students’ awareness of diaphasic and diastratic variation: register and style variation is ‘the’ focus when reflection is on characters’ spoken interactions, and it is also true that descriptive passages in literary fiction often contain clues to identify the contextual and social elements which influence the production of such interactions, thus making the whole learning process more meaningful (and therefore didactically effective) for the student. As already mentioned in § 2.3 (speaking of Bakhtin’s intuitions on the importance of using literature to boost language learning), an explanation of the dialogic relationships present in the text (i.e. of the interactions amongst different social, cultural and/or personal positions) can in fact help to reconstruct the implicit communicative situation. Hence, this focus can encourage a more creative use of language on the students’ part while at the same time involving them in more worldrelated and meaningful communicative learning situations. A far cry from the language and learning situations to be found in most textbooks, and this is further illustrated by the extracts below (Tables 13, 14): Non mi ha risposto. Ha rimesso i calciatori nelle loro scatole e ha arrotolato il campo del Subbuteo. – Allora? Ti va? Ha girato la chiave e ha aperto la porta. – Non posso. Viene il maestro. Se non ho fatto i compiti glielo dice a quelle due e poi chi le sente. – Ma come? Non vuoi vederlo? Non ti è piaciuto il mio segreto? – Non molto. Non mi interessano i pazzi nei buchi. – Me lo dài il Vicenza? – Prenditelo. Tanto mi fa schifo –. Mi ha cacciato in mano la scatola e mi ha spinto fuori dalla stanza. E ha chiuso la porta. Table 13: N. Ammaniti 2011, Io non ho paura, Torino: Einaudi, 147

«Nun me pòi comanda’» disse Lu Purk. «Tu non sei babbo a me, quindi nun me pòi comanda’!» «Antonio, anima santa, perché piangi?» disse la nonna andandogli incontro. «Che t’è successo, amore della nonna?» chiese, accarezzandogli la testa. «C’hai tutto l’orecchio rosso!...» «È stata sorema» piagnucolò Lu Purk. «Che t’ha fatto ’st’anima?» chiese incredula la nonna. «Perché l’hai fatto piangere?» «È un bugiardo e dà fastidio» disse la ragazza, colma d’astio. «Ha

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detto un sacco di calunnie sul conto di Teo e mio.» «Non si dicono le bugie» lo rimproverò bonariamente la nonna. «Quali bugie?» disse Antò fra i singhiozzi. «Io li sso’ visti veramente…» Table 14: S. Ballestra 2001 [1991], “La via per Berlino”, in Compleanno dell’iguana, Milano: SuperPocket, 72-73

These texts, particularly the one in Table 14, which also contains some dialectal elements and well differentiated uses of language by the different characters, are good evidence of the standard spoken language that Covito was referring to in the article quoted above. For the sake of completeness, but also to provide the reader with sufficient grounding, we will now add a few more historical and descriptive details about the literary trend to which the Italian texts presented up to this point and further on in this chapter belong, the ‘New Italian narrative’. This narrative trend can be said to be the most outstanding product on the Italian literary scene since the 90s. Acclaimed by Gruppo 63 avant-garde writers and intellectuals for their provocative themes, innovative use of language and strong plots, young writers such as Ammaniti, Ballestra, Brolli, Brizzi, and many others are often described as cattivisti or maledettisti. Sometimes also labelled as “cannibals”, “pulp” or “third wave” writers (as previously mentioned), they share an interesting use of youth jargon and culture (Barilli 2000, Colombo 1997, Cordelli 1996, Denti 1996, Di Stefano 1996, Guglielmi 1996a-b, La Porta 1999, Piccinini 1997, Sinibaldi 1997) and can be said to target an audience of young readers who seem to appreciate this focus on the world viewed from a young person’s perspective, as attested by high sales figures. Vivevano il loro strano sogno e si raccontavano tutto e camminavano e parlavano e ridevano e camminavano e parlavano contro tutto il già visto come in un lungo sogno, quei matti. E poi, e poi e poi un brutto giorno le parole, fra loro, erano state fonte di malintesi. Anzi, fonte di un malinteso, uno solo ma che era la cosa più triste che avesse mai provato in tutta la vita un sabato sera freddo gelido, in piazza Maggiore, il vecchio Alex le aveva chiesto di mettersi con lui. Era la cosa più ovvia a quel punto, no? Solo che. Solo che lei gli aveva stretto forte la mano, detto che ci avrebbe pensato su, ma aveva un’ombra triste negli occhi. Lui era tornato a casa sentendosi soffocare, col presentimento che, per un tempo di cui non riusciva a mettere a fuoco i dettagli, con Aidi non si

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sarebbe sentito. E tutta la domenica seguente, Alex forte, Alex incazzato, Alex che se ne frega, era rimasto sul letto a leggersi Il gabbiano, mio Dio, Jonathan Livingstone che gli aveva prestato proprio Aidi. Alex inutile e triste come la birra senz’alcool. Table 15: E. Brizzi 2006 [1997], Jack Frusciante è uscito dal gruppo, Milano: Baldini Castoldi Dalai, 27

Enrico Brizzi’s Jack Frusciante è uscito dal gruppo was one of the first examples of youth parlance in Italian fiction. In addition to representing a story which would appeal to most young spirits, Brizzi’s use of language corresponds perfectly to the four characters of intentionality identified by Sobrero as markers of youngsters’ language (1993): ludic, cryptic, denoting social cohesion and opposition. The following extract (Table 16) provides clearer evidence of this: Bene. Avevano deciso che un giorno sarebbero andati a Parigi insieme, i nostri due pirati – occhiali da sole e facce allegre da gita sulla banchina della Gare de Lyon. Io me li vedo. Potrebbero anche farlo, un giorno. E allora, perché cavolo i suoi occhi sono così – come dire – sono così lustri, mentre per l’ultima volta scende come un Girardengo appena appena più basso e rock per la via Codivilla? Cos’altro fa, il nostro matto, piange? Non lo sa neanche lui. Certo che pedala da Dio, a vederlo dalla telecamera dell’elicottero. E che appiombo. Non male, vero? Comunque, no, mica piange. Ha solo gli occhi un pochino lustri per via dell’enorme velocità, è chiaro. Okay. È anche perché quel figlio di puttana del piccolo principe ha addomesticato la volpe. E poi, forse, perché magari sta pensando che dei due pirati, adesso, qualcosa è come stesse andando un po’ via per sempre. Sapete come ragionano certi ciclisti sentimentali, alle volte. Magari sta giusto pensando che determinate cose, nella vita dell’Uomo, possono succedere una volta sola. Sì, insomma, potrebbe farlo. Di sicuro ha in mente questa ragazza che crede ancora che le persone siano quasi tutte buone. Vive praticamente in una casa in mezzo al bosco ed è venuta a salutarlo all’aeroporto, un giorno. E poi ha in mente quella volta al telefono, che il vecchio Alex credeva fosse la tal persona e invece era la madre. Di quella tale, intendo. E ci sono anche tutti i pomeriggi passati sull’erba del giardino di una

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certa ragazza, una mezza pirata, ad ascoltare musica e parlare e. Comunque no, non piange mica. E poi è un Girardengo, kazzo… Diobbuòno cosa fila, adesso. Ehi, dico, ma lo vedete? Ma sì, ma sì, lasciamolo correre questo ragazzo, e date retta al sottoscritto che lo conosce da sempre. Se ha gli occhi un pochino lustri, è per via che il vecchio Alex, quando fila così come il vento Table 16: E. Brizzi, 2006 [1997], Jack Frusciante è uscito dal gruppo, Milano: Baldini Castoldi Dalai, 180-182

Jack Frusciante è uscito dal gruppo also has the flavour of seventies jargon. This is particularly evident in the use of the grapheme k for the voiceless velar occlusive in lieu of c or ch (see, for example, ‘kazzo’ above), which first appeared in the political graffitis of that period (Berisso 2000). Incidentally, in Brizzi we also sense the influence of translation on a source text as the translation of The Catcher in the Rye is surely the basis of Brizzi’s use of ‘vecchio’ in “il vecchio Alex” (as opposed to Holden Caulfield’s appellative “Il giovane Holden” in the translated Italian version) (Berisso 2000). Now, whereas the ‘new narrative’ produced by young Italian writers such as those mentioned by Covito or by British authors like Nick Hornby has come to be widely accepted and in some cases even acclaimed by critics, what is more strictly labelled as ‘chick-lit’ is viewed both in Englishspeaking countries and in Italy as a sub-product of serious literature, to be barred from academic institutions. However, if we consider the ‘literariness’ of a text to be a form of knowledge, i.e. of learning from experience without undergoing the trial and error of real experience,17 then we should probably view chick-lit in the same way as we look at other literary phenomena of a higher quality. This type of literature can also help students to experience and face up to the endless variety of human existence and life situations and learn how to deal with them, as is evident in the extract below (Table 17): Mmm. There is absolutely nothing nicer on a summer's day than a nice cold glass of– Hang on a minute. My eyes open. Pimm’s. Shit. I promised to do the Pimm’s stall with Connor, didn’t I? I glance at my watch and realize I'm already ten minutes late. Oh, bloody hell. No

 17

Which is probably also one of the aspects that scientific investigation and literature have in common. 

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wonder he’s stressed out. I hastily apologize to Phillip and Katie, then hurry as fast as I can to the stall, which is in the corner of the garden. There I find Connor manfully coping with a huge queue all on his own. He’s dressed as Henry VIII, with puffy sleeves and breeches, and has a huge red beard stuck to his face. He must be absolutely boiling. ‘Sorry,’ I mutter, sliding in beside him. ‘I had to get into my costume. What do I have to do?’ ‘Pour out glasses of Pimm’s,’ says Connor curtly. ‘One pound fifty each. Do you think you can manage?’ ‘Yes!’ I say, a bit nettled. ‘Of course I can manage!’ For the next few minutes we’re too busy serving Pimm’s to talk. Then the queue melts away, and we’re left on our own again. Connor isn’t even looking at me, and he’s clanking glasses around so ferociously I'm afraid he might break one. Why is he in such a bad mood? ‘Connor, look, I’m sorry I’m late.’ ‘That’s all right,’ he says stiffly, and starts chopping a bundle of mint as though he wants to kill it. ‘So, did you have a nice time the other evening?’ That’s what this is all about. ‘Yes, I did, thanks,’ I say after a pause. ‘With your new mystery man.’ ‘Yes,’ I say, and surreptitiously scan the crowded lawn, searching for Jack. ‘It’s someone at work, isn’t it?’ Connor suddenly says, and my stomach gives a small plunge. ‘Why do you say that?’ I say lightly. ‘That’s why you won’t tell me who it is.’ ‘It's not that! It’s just… look, Connor, can’t you just respect my privacy?’ ‘I think I have a right to know who I’ve been dumped for.’ He shoots me a reproachful look. ‘No you don’t!’ I retort, then realize that sounds a bit mean. ‘I just don’t think it’s very helpful to discuss it.’ ‘Well, I’ll work it out.’ His jaw sets grimly. ‘It won’t take me long.’ ‘Connor, please. I really don’t think–‘ ‘Emma, I’m not stupid.’ He gives me an appraising look. ‘I know you a lot better than you think I do.’ I feel a flicker of uncertainty. Maybe I’ve underestimated Connor all this time. Maybe he does know me. Oh God. What if he guesses? Table 17: S. Kinsella 2003, Can you Keep a Secret?, London: Black Swan, 219220

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We should not be surprised, then, that a restricted number of academics are now convinced that chick-lit should receive some literary and scholarly attention (Ferris and Young 2005), not least due to its sociological implications: the female protagonists are more often than not career-driven and pursuing objectives other than – or at least not restricted to – a family. It is probably about time for universities to come to terms and learn to deal with mass culture. Students (our students, at least)18 seem to thoroughly enjoy this type of literature, and we cannot ignore their preferences. Indeed, such preferences should be taken into consideration, investigated, and used as a springboard towards further literary exploration. We certainly do not intend to suggest that students should be encouraged to set their sights on this kind of ‘literature’ alone, but we cannot rule out the possibility that, through it, we may gain a greater knowledge of young people, their tastes and their worlds and this may in turn reflect on our capacity to both guide them towards ‘real’ literature and provide them with the tools to approach it. We agree with Luperini that from an emphasis on too much analysis (“da una fase in cui il testo veniva soffocato da un’enorme quantità di analisi tecnico-formali e ridotto ad una serie di schemi e schemini ispirati al formalismo strutturalista”; Luperini 1998: 123) we have probably now moved on to a ‘sink or swim’ experience into which students are thrown with no preparation at all. It must always be remembered that the pleasure of reading is a laborious, arduous conquest (“ad un’altra in cui – si dice – bisognerebbe abbandonarlo, vergine, al “piacere della lettura” degli studenti, alla loro spontanea voglia di capirlo. Si dimentica così che – oggi forse ancor più di ieri – il piacere della lettura è una conquista faticosa, non un dato di partenza su cui poter contare”; Luperini 1998: 123). However, we are convinced that by starting out from texts that the students are more likely to find entertaining while at the same time approaching them with the linguist’s (and literary scholar’s) ‘serious’ tools, the teacher may find a third way to successfully refamiliarise students with the literary text. It is interesting to note that by exploiting a selection of books or extracts which the students feel in some way reflect their actual (or aspired) lifestyle, and/or their way of speaking, we are in fact responding to the classical principle of “teaching, moving and delighting” (docere, movere, delectare). Moreover, harking back to the authenticity issue, we cannot deny that these texts are authentic19 because:

 18 See Di Martino forthcoming. 19

In line with Widdowson’s caveats, as previously mentioned.

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they are not written for language teaching purposes (Jordan 1997); they are designed for native speakers (Harmer 1991); they are written in a language which is close to everyday oral language.

In line with Radtke (1993) and Marcato (1997), we must also remember the strong link between young people’s language and contemporary language. As Danesi (1997) suggests, young people are curious to get to know how their peers speak as well as to learn how to express ‘coolness’ in a foreign language. This stands in perfect agreement with a view of education as participation (Sfard 1998) and acquisition which aims at favouring the learners’ pursuit of membership of certain communities or, when referring more specifically to the field of (second) language learning, with a view of education “not as the acquisition of a new set of grammatical, lexical and phonological forms but as a struggle of concrete, socially constituted and always situated beings to participate in the symbolically mediated lifeworld (see Habermas 1987) of another culture” (Pavlenko and Lantolf 2000: 155). Such a view foregrounds “issues of affiliation and belonging” (156) and focuses on first-person narratives, once again underlining the intrinsic value of narrative as a tool for both identity construction and integration. As Hall affirms, it also “potentially returns literature to a central role as texts through which language learners can explore who they are and who they are not, and who they might be becoming as they participate in this new language. Language learning is seen as the development of new ideas and personality, rather than acquisition of a set of new labels for familiar objects or at most of new syntactic rules” (Hall 2005: 77). Since learners are exposed not to ‘input’, but to ‘affordances’, “from which they select those that best fit their experience” (Kramsch 2004 [2002]: 7), literature certainly offers the best repertoire of affordances meant as “action possibilities” latent in the environment (Gibson 1977). Teachers are often worried by the fact that learners, particularly foreign language learners, may misunderstand great works and therefore misinterpret them, whereas Kramsch argues that this cultural estrangement, “the moment of rupture or disjuncture between interlocutors’ assumptions and expectations” (Kramsch 1995: 89) should in fact be welcome: “It is precisely those moments of discrepancy between the culturally intended reader and the culturally foreign reader that the language teacher should value the most” (Kramsch 2004 [1993]: 128). As Hall effectively sums up:

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The traditional classroom, informed by the idea of culture as fixed somehow ‘out there’, independent of the discourses in which it takes place and of language as a code of others (‘native speakers’) to be passively mastered, taught – as did the traditional literature classroom – that the ‘experts’’ views were more valid than those of the learner (…). But a classroom informed by ideas of discourse and dialogue encourages and explores and values alternative perspectives and experiences (Hall 2005: 80).

In concluding this section, we would like to briefly mention the potentialities of the Web for an even richer and more meaningful use of literature for the language learner, who can be given the task of surfing the Internet for suitable texts. While Facebook does not seem to be a particularly good means to reach out to young people literature-wise, blogs, YouTube and above all Twitter seem to offer more. Goodreads is another obvious option, but the real assets are Tumblr and Wattpad: Of the 106 million blogs on Tumblr – which skews younger than Facebook – 21 % belong to children under 18 and 30% belong to 18- to 24year-olds, according to Quantcast, a company that measures Web traffic. On the multimedia-friendly site, authors like Rainbow Rowell, Holly Black, Laurie Halse Anderson, and Neil Gaiman share everything from animated GIFs and playlists of songs to listen to while reading a particular book to photos of nail art and of cakes they bake and decorate in honor of favorite books. “Tumblr is kind of like a mix of everything,” says Becky Tsivin, 16, a sophomore at Stevenson High School in Lincolnshire, 111. She follows authors including Cassandra Clare, Libba Bray, Veronica Roth, and John Green, who has a community of some 200,000 fans on the platform. '”Unlike Facebook and Twitter, Tumblr thrives on creation, collaboration, and mashing-up," Green says. "And it's cooler because your mom isn't on it.” Another way the platform differs from Facebook: Tumblr lets people write under invented names. So Ellis Weiner, the author of the Templeton Twins middle-grade series, writes the books' Tumblr and responds to comments in character as the series narrator. "It's delightfully in-world, "says Chronicle's Presley. Other publishers are also using the platform to promote books in quirky ways. Bloomsbury invited fans to send in their own vintage family photos, or photos of themselves wearing vintage fashion, for a campaign for Lindsey Leavitt's Going Vintage. According to Rachel Fershleiser, who handles Tumblr's literary strategic outreach, "Your URL might be a reference to what you love. The focus is less on who you are than on your passions. The culture on Tumblr is a little bit intellectual, a little bit nerdy. We've got a huge community of teens who spend their spare time reading" (Springen 2013: 34).

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The social network phenomenon has become so invasive and widespread that more canonical authors have turned to it too, to maintain popularity and open up a further channel of communication with their readership. Though we cannot discuss the implications for the language learner here, the advantages appear self-evident: Established authors turn to Wattpad, too. Prior to the June 4 release of her latest book. Tidal, Hocking (who got her start with self-published e-books) and St. Martin's put up a complete short story called "Forgotten Lyrics" and also posted extended excerpts of Wake and Lullaby, the first two books in her Watersong series. With Wattpad, authors can post from their mobile devices. If they set their accounts to do so, when they post new chapters or reply to readers, notices post to their Facebook and Twitter accounts as well. "It makes it so much easier for a book to go viral," says Cootauco. Fans with the mobile app get text "push notifications" every time authors they're following on Wattpad post new chapters of books. They can then click to read the chapters on their screens (Springen 2013: 36).

A further area of development opened up by New Technologies could be that of emphasising the transactional aspect of meaning-making: students could be encouraged to re-write (or parody) the stories they like by using collaborative tools or by modifying them in several ways, for example finding alternative endings, analysing the effects of different text versions, etc. It is worth stressing the number and complexity of skills involved in parody writing, as “to take such specific liberties with a literary text, one has to get to know it in detail first” (Reid 1984: 29). The students’ creations could then be socialised via the Internet.

2.2.3 Approaching Young Adult Literature from a linguistic perspective In the preceding sections we have underlined the crucial role of choice, i.e. the correlation between taking into account our students’ preferences and their growing interest in reading, which in turn also affects their level of literacy and language learning. However, if YA Literature is to be specifically beneficial to the language class, we must adopt a ‘principled’, i.e. professionally thought out and methodologically grounded, approach: it is not just a question of choosing different (including noncanonical) types of texts, closer to our students’ tastes and sensitivities; it is also a question of approaching those texts from a different, truly linguistic, perspective. Conventionally, literature has appeared in the language class in the form of well-written passages followed by a string of questions regarding

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comprehension and literary appreciation, but expert users of a language do not merely have to contend with understanding words and/or using them in a semantically appropriate manner. As Bardovi-Harling, Hartford, MahanTaylor, Morgan and Reynolds, among many others, argue: Speakers who do not use pragmatically appropriate language run the risk of appearing uncooperative at the least, or, more seriously, rude or insulting. This is particularly true of advanced learners whose high linguistic proficiency leads other speakers to expect concomitantly high pragmatic competence (Bardovi-Harling, Hartford, Mahan-Taylor, Morgan and Reynolds 1991: 4).

In ‘real’ life, pragmatic mistakes are in fact far more serious than linguistic ones: (…) the real responsibility of the classroom teacher is not to instruct students specifically in the intricacies of complimenting, direction-giving, or closing a conversation: rather, it is to make students more aware that pragmatic functions exist in language, specifically in discourse, in order that they may be more aware of these functions as learners (BardoviHarling, Hartford, Mahan-Taylor, Morgan and Reynolds 1991: 5).

As already anticipated, this is exactly where we think the types of texts that we have presented here, approached using the linguist’s tools, can fit in and prove to be irreplaceable, as they offer language in context. The descriptive passages they present often contain clues to identifying the contextual and social elements which affect interactions in terms of register, linguistic choices etc. This can clearly contribute to making the teaching process more effective. In order to bolster our claims, we are now going to outline a few activities that could easily be used in the language learning context. Such activities are not accompanied by any precise indication about necessary prerequisites or advised levels of competence, based on the philosophy that, in a truly student-centred learning path, the teacher will select whatever materials s/he deems to be most suitable for the individual learner in that specific learning situation. Moreover, as this book is not intended to be a manual, no operative sections will follow the more theoretical presentations of the chapters focusing on different literary genres; a few practical examples will merely be offered here and there throughout the chapters. This choice stems from the consideration that ready-made materials can often hinder rather than help: amongst all other teachers, language teachers have always possessed the greatest inventiveness and ability to improvise.

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Their didactic creativity can often be spurred by very little input, and here we aim to offer a further reason for taking literature into the classroom: re-familiarising students with literary fiction and possibly leading them back to the literary text tout court is crucial to language ends because, apparently, “[r]eaders of literature pay more attention to precise surface linguistic forms, particularly if they are stylistically ‘foregrounded’” (Hall 2005: 98, referencing van Peer 1986, 1992; Miall and Kuiken 1994). What sort of activities, then? Let us take another sample of Italian ‘new narrative’ from Ammaniti: «Scommetto che sei entrata in para per il piercing!» disse Esmeralda. Ma come faceva quella là a capire sempre a cosa stava pensando? Le leggeva nel pensiero? Fabiana guardò l’amica che stava rollando un’altra canna. Cercò di apparire tranquilla. «No, stavo pensando a tutt’altro.» Ma era come se in fronte avesse scritto a caratteri cubitali: BECCATA! «E a cosa pensavi?» «A niente.» «Pensavi a quando il dentista andrà da tua madre… “Signora, sua figlia si è fatta il piercing sulla lingua”…» Ma quanto ci godi che i miei mi rompono i coglioni? «Guarda che i medici sono costretti per professione a non rivelare niente.» Esmeralda sollevò il naso dalla cartina e fece un’espressione esterrefatta. «Ma sei fuori? Il dentista?» « È così. Fanno un giuramento… Lo so…» «Sì, il giuramento di Senofonte. Come no… Stai a sentire me… Non ci andare. Rimani qua. Io, se fossi in te, non me li inculerei di striscio al Merda e a tua madre… Ti comandano a bacchetta, ti considerano una cretina. Fatti valere, per una volta in vita tua.» (…) Esmeralda porse la canna a Fabiana. «Almeno facciamoci il cannino della buonanotte.» «No, sono troppo cotta. Non mi reggo in piedi. Vado.» «E dài, Fabi, lo sai che porta sfiga farsi le canne da soli» fece Esmeralda con la vocina da bambina triste. «Devo andare…» Le afferrò la mano. «Sei arrabbiata, vero, perché ti ho detto del dentista?» «No, è che devo andare.» Esmeralda abbassò gli occhi neri e poi li rialzò. «Scusami, Fabi…»

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«No, è che devo andare.» Esmeralda abbassò gli occhi neri e poi li rialzò. «Scusami, Fabi…» «Di che?» «Lo sai… Non succederà niente, vedrai. Al massimo tua madre ti fa una scenata dal dentista… Tranquilla.» Fabiana si accorse che la rabbia si era volatilizzata. Bastava che Esmeralda la guardasse in quel modo e lei si scioglieva come una cretina. «Vabè, però poi scappo.» «Ti amo!» Esmeralda scattò in piedi e le stampò un bacio sulla bocca e l’abbracciò forte e poi disse: «Però questa ce la facciamo seria. Passami la bottiglia di Uliveto e una penna». Table 18: N. Ammaniti 2006, Come Dio comanda, Milano: Mondadori, 70

An activity to be used in connection with the text above (Table 18)20 could focus on the specific aspect that makes it most interesting both for a language class and for a young audience, i.e. its use of young people’s language in relation to certain characters. A form could be prepared based on the main elements identified by Sobrero 1990 and re-used by Cortelazzo 1994 as characteristic of Italian youth language, and students could be asked to fill in the empty spaces with appropriate examples (Handout in Table 19).21 It is interesting that, in the excerpt above, young people’s language seems to be used as a sort of optional register (as in Berisso’s survey 2000). Moreover, it appears to be in line with Albrecht’s opinion (1993) that young people’s language is a phenomenon linked to the upper middle classes, whose younger generations can afford a longer permanence in education and a delayed entrance into the productive process. The character who seems to best represent this in the passage and, indeed, in the whole of Ammaniti’s Come Dio comanda, is Esmeralda. Fabiana, who appears to belong to a world of well-being which is of more recent origin, is torn between her relationship with Esmeralda and with her previous – and simpler – friends, and this comes across in her language: it is less sophisticated and only shares the constant recourse to pornolalia with Esmeralda’s. This type of text can also familiarize the student with diastratic variation: a variety of registers and styles is there to be exposed and analysed for didactic purposes.

 20

For a full linguistic comment on the passage and more background information on the book and its author see chapter 5. 21 For more teaching ideas, see Di Martino and Di Sabato forthcoming.

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58 A basis of colloquial, informal Italian

A dialectal layer

Figure di merda, Mi rompono i coglioni, Beccata

A layer of traditional, long-lasting jargon

A layer of innovative jargon

Sei entrata in para Il Merda Porta sfiga Stava rollando un’altra canna Sono troppo cotta Questa ce la facciamo seria

Sei fuori? Non me li inculerei di striscio, Facciamoci il cannino della buonanotte

A layer coming from the language of adverts, massmedia and music

A layer made up of contributions from other languages, mostly English Piercing

Table 19: Handout of activity focused on Italian youth language based on Sobrero 1990 and Cortelazzo 1994

A further activity focusing on language use in the same text could be organized as follows (Table 20): GROUPWORK 1. 2. 3. 4.

5.

Read the text. How old do you think Esmeralda and Fabiana are? What makes you say so? Do you feel they belong to a specific social class? If so, which one and what makes you say so? If not, why not? a. Underline the parts that you feel are not in standard Italian. Standard Italian comprises those words and expressions that you would use in a formal situation or when talking to someone you do not know well or who is distant from you in terms of age and social status. b. What would the standard equivalents of these non-standard words and expressions be? Make the text more standard, then less standard.



Table 20: Script of activity focused on language use

Some activities could also focus on expressiveness, and students (given access to the appropriate reference materials)22 could be asked to provide

 22

For example, Manzoni and Dalmonte 1980.

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near equivalents of the slangy expressions used in duelling situations like the one described in the text below (Table 21), taken from another book that could easily be included in the YA Literature category: "Allora chiariamoci subito: mi hai fottuto le mie chiavi, hai fottuto la mia macchina e soprattutto hai fottuto me.” “Magari! Quest'ultima cosa non mi dispiacerebbe affatto. " Gin è davanti a me con le mani sui fianchi e sbuffa. “Cretino, nel senso che hai fottuto la mia serata. Mettiamola così, sennò ti fai pure strane idee. Vedi poco fa in macchina..." "Per così poco... Come te la tiri!" "Allora passiamo al pratico. Chiariamo una volta per tutte. Chi scuce qui?" "Cioè?" "Fai il finto tonto?" "Vediamo, se tiri fuori argomenti divertenti, pago io. Sennò..." Table 21: F. Moccia 2006, Ho voglia di te, Milano: Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, 130

This passage is taken from Ho voglia di te, a 2006 novel by Federico Moccia, author of the bestseller Tre metri sopra il cielo. As is evident here and in many of the texts presented above, conversations in a certain kind of contemporary fiction often reflect the expressive strength of authentic language use. As such, they offer excellent contexts for studying the pragmalinguistic features of verbal exchanges while at the same time avoiding the risks inherent in using transcripts of real conversations: competent but resource-limited language users might in fact not display an ‘acceptable’ use of grammar and might violate syntax far more often than is warranted in a teaching context (Chipere 1998). Many contemporary writers seem to limit the amount of syntax violation in the dialogues they make up 23 while still maintaining its presence in conversations and sometimes using it as a means to sketch their characters’ personalities. This probably happens because an ‘excessive’ use of syntax violation would shift the reader’s attention away from the story and onto the language code instead. The language used is a sort of ‘cleansed’ but still realistic spoken language, which makes it, we argue, ideal material for

 23

Berisso (2000: 472) suggests that the language used in these texts is close to the “italiano dell’uso medio” (Sabatini 1985) and that few authors seem willing to push in the direction of non-standard: most authors are reluctant to embrace the most extreme non-standard syntactic forms and favour, instead, a mimesis of orality in a wider sense. Such is the case of writers like Campo and Brizzi, who shift to a sort of pulp orthodoxy (Berisso 2000: 471). 

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didactic purposes. Last but not least, because this type of literature is close to students’ actual or imagined lives (and language), it will probably be easier to guide them towards that authentication of the language they use, and that Widdowson calls for, than it would be in the case of texts (and language) which are psychologically more remote.24 The reader may wonder whether or not it is advisable to expose students to taboo language, which is one of the (but not the only!) components of expressiveness and a characterizing feature of much contemporary fiction, especially the type which is targeted at young people. Even leaving aside the high occurrence of taboo language outside the classroom and the fact that taboo words are sometimes the first words young learners acquire in a foreign language, the “interesting paradox” (Dewaele 2004: 205) that strong language seldom appears in textbooks or classroom discussions may be detrimental to the learner as this absence may give rise to a distorted view of such language as well as an inappropriate use of it in real situations. For this reason, Andersson and Trudgill (1990) include taboo language in the linguistic material that the learner should be exposed to: it is up to the teacher to point out what language and which language uses are inappropriate in specific contexts. Rather than dichotomizing language use into ‘good’ or ‘bad’, teachers should consider all language in terms of its suitability to different contexts, thus enhancing the learners’ language repertoire. The consideration that taboo language is also employed as a release mechanism in stressful situations (Allan and Burridge 2006) is also interesting.25 In order to understand our focus in this section on slangy language and on the expressive language used in confrontational situations, one needs to be aware of the results of Danesi’s interesting Toronto survey, and his follow-up reflection that “teaching a target language as a code for communicating in hypothetical adult situations has little meaning to the adolescent learner” (Danesi 1997: 456): young people are not only eager to know how their peers speak, but also keen to learn how to express ‘coolness’ in a foreign language.26 They are interested in learning what Danesi refers to as foreign language “pubilect” or adolescent talk and its emotive, connotative and clique-coded characteristics. In particular, they wish to acquire those verbal conflict skills which seem to be critical in



For a more in-depth analysis, cfr Di Martino 2009. To get a clearer idea of how linguistic impoliteness and social disruption in literary discourse can be useful in studying/understanding the social dynamics of interaction, see Abbas 2012. 26 For a fuller picture of the manifestations and meanings of ‘coolness’ in the contemporary teenager, cfr Danesi 1994. 24 25

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maintaining a suitable status within the peer group. As Danesi points out, it is not a question of training our students to speak “pubilect” or slangy language, but this should certainly be incorporated in the syllabus as “authentic conversational material” (Danesi 1997: 462). Danesi also emphasises the importance of verbal duelling for young people to assert their leadership within the group and stresses the importance of understanding the nature of contemporary adolescent talk with a view to making “classrooms much more responsive to our clientele, more realistic in our objectives, and hopefully more effective in realizing the fundamental goal of transmitting proficiency” (Danesi 1997: 455). Hence the importance of also focusing on the development of verbal conflict skills in the target language, when we are dealing with school or University students, in particular. This is to go against D’Achille 2005’s argument that the habit of using language in a “juvenile way” is currently linked to lifestyle rather than age (which actually shows that activities like these may probably be suitable for learners of a wider age range than we normally surmise).27

 27

On the use of taboo language in the foreign language class, also see Di Sabato 2011; Cordisco and Di Sabato 2008.



CHAPTER THREE WELL-VERSED: ENHANCING LANGUAGE AWARENESS THROUGH POETRY A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language. – Wystan H. Auden, The Dyer’s Hand and Other Essays, 1986 [1948]

3.1 On the use of poetry in language teaching Over the years few attempts have been made to encourage the use of poetry in language teaching (Barbieri 2011; Carter and Mac Rae 1996; Hirsch 1999; Kramsch 2004 [1993]; Mac Rae 1998; Maley and Duff 1989; Maybin and Mercer 1996; Wainwright 2011 [2004]; the most extensive work being Hanauer’s 2001-2011), while there are many publications of the “how to” style (how to read/understand/write poetry) ranging from the merely divulgative to the highly academic. Though poetry remains mainly in the realms of literary criticism and poetics, it could also be exploited from a language teaching perspective, and the language teacher can also draw inspiration from the many writings by poets on their personal work and, clearly, from poetry writing in general. In spite of the many possible uses, most teachers still think it wise to steer clear of poetry in the language classroom because, unlike other text types, a poetic text can present unexpected difficulties. The following pages aim to present a rather different view of poetry seen as a language competence ‘booster’: without going into unnecessary details and technicalities, we will illustrate how its introduction as a linguistic expression can fruitfully enable students to become aware of the full potentialities of language. In Kramsch’s words (2004 [1993]: 156), poetry has the power to detach “the readers from their usual frames of reference by immersing them in a world of sounds, rhythms, stress and other formal features of speech”. It allows readers to become acquainted with rhetorical language, i.e. new ways of forming sounds, shaping words, phrases, sentences, structuring discourse and relating it to other texts, conceptualizing experience



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(Kramsch 2004 [1993], quoting Scardamalia and Bereiter 1985. See also Schultz 1996). This has been extensively documented by experiments on poetry reading as a construction of meaning (Hanauer 2010; 2007a), in line with Kramsch 2009. Within the context of meaningful literacy instruction, Hanauer’s humanizing approach to language teaching views poetry writing as a form of “personal meaning construction”, which contributes to learning a language as “part of a process of widening and deepening the ways an individual can understand, interpret, feel and express her or his personally meaningful understandings to themselves and within social settings” (Hanauer 2011: 4). It is worth pointing out that the students Hanauer worked with were advanced second language learners and it is commonly believed that the use of poetry may be of benefit, if at all, only at the higher levels of competence. We posit, however, that such experimentation should be carried out at any level as it constitutes a worthwhile tool in a holistic approach to language pedagogy (see also the suggestions in Schultz 1996 to overcome students’ initial hesitation). Thus, as part of a more general philosophy based on a student-centred language pedagogy (as already mentioned in § 2.2.3), clearcut guidelines – such as distinguishing the activities among levels of competence and/or first, second or foreign language learning - will not be adopted here. This will leave the reader free to pick from the basket whatever is most suitable for the actual teaching context, learner(s), and objective(s) s/he has in mind. Hopefully, this will help pave the way to a reconsideration of poetry as a textual language learning tool: while not being exhaustive, these considerations are intended as a source of inspiration, allowing individual teachers to make their own, often difficult, decisions.

3.2 Introducing poetry to learners On a more empirical basis, poetry is already a practice for many language learners. For instance, early learning activities are frequently based on what are commonly acknowledged to be forms of poetic language: nursery rhymes, word plays, songs, the latter also being extensively used in second and foreign language classrooms with young adults (Edmondson 1997) to raise and maintain their interest, while practising comprehension and pronunciation. In addition, the positive impact on motivation of meaning construction activities based on poetry reading followed by group discussion at primary school (Hanauer 2007a), and with English as a second language with advanced learners (Hanauer 2011b), cannot be disregarded. The value of poetry as a means to elicit commonly-used linguistic resources without



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full awareness of their impact on meaning, has similarly been discussed and documented (Wainwright 2011 [2004]). It is a fact, however, that the first reaction towards poetry is of rejection because this type of writing is associated with difficulty and obscureness, while any learner is reassured by what is felt to be comprehensible, even when dealing with his or her own mother tongue. Indeed, as Pope observed quoting Jakobson, poetry may be perceived as “‘organised violence committed on ordinary speech’. That is, poetry both disturbs and reforms the patterns of routine language” (Pope 2012 [1998]: 142). Such a description of poetry is certainly very incisive, but it may be interpreted positively or negatively. In any educational context, therefore, it is advisable to start by redefining poetry and to adopt an extended meaning for this word, perhaps by consulting canonical dictionary or encyclopedia definitions. Indeed, if learners could be encouraged to surf the web for a topic-based research, their misconceptions about poetry might well be demolished. The Net offers interesting findings that might become the starting point for class activities. Consider, for example, the following: When people are presented with a series of passages drawn indifferently from poems and stories but all printed as prose, they will show a dominant inclination to identify everything they possibly can as prose. This will be true, surprisingly enough, even if the poem rhymes and will often be true even if the poem in its original typographical arrangement is familiar to them. The reason seems to be absurdly plain: readers recognize poetry by its appearance on the page, and they respond to the convention whereby they recognize it by reading it aloud in a quite different tone of voice from the one they apply to prose (which, indeed, they do not read aloud at all). It should be added that they make this distinction also without reading aloud; even in silent reading they confer upon a piece of poetry an attention that differs from what they give to prose in two ways especially: in tone and in pace (Encyclopaedia Britannica 2013).

Such words raise a few smiles and shed new light on the true nature of poetry, viewed as a text organized in lines, characterized by a distinctive use of sounds and syllables, which invites us to ascribe a particular tone and pace to it, generally producing a rhythmic effect when reading. This is the message that should be conveyed to learners and this is what needs to be emphasized for this type of text to be beneficial as a language learning activity. By providing a clear definition of poetry and by demolishing all associations with poetry as a literary subject prone to complicated stylistic interpretations, language teachers should succeed in motivating and reassuring their students.



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Of course not all poetry is readily accessible, and students often get discouraged even when faced with a poem in their mother tongue. In order to fully appreciate a poem, sensations and reactions must be allowed to flow, while meaning and unanimous interpretation necessarily take a back seat. This approach might also work with foreign language learners who can feel reassured by the fact that they do not have to reach or produce any particular insight which might be impaired by their inadequate mastery of the language. Approaching poetry as though one were chatting to a friend appears to be a very useful tactic: Poems do not have to be all about the revelation, the learning at the end. They aren't necessarily goal-oriented. If anything they are more like a conversation with a friend. You start talking, you learn something, you double back, you get confused, you misunderstand, you laugh, you have some different feelings, you drift off, you come back, you know you have learned some things (though maybe you can’t even say what) but most of all you know you know this person better. What’s the goal? To be alive, and to experience. Which is more than enough, and a great pleasure (Zapruder 2010: 279).

This fascinating approach to poetry is in an essay about the effectiveness of paraphrasing, one of the most commonly practiced poetry-based activities. Paraphrasing is commonly believed to be the key to understanding the meaning of a poem and a useful exercise from the language point of view. Indeed, paraphrasing produces good results as the learner is encouraged to observe the nuances in meaning between two different ways of saying the same thing, although this might equally and perhaps more successfully be done with prose. The reading and understanding of poetry might well be spoiled by this practice and it is wise to encourage learners and poetry readers in general to resist what is in fact a natural tendency, and not to get discouraged by possible obstacles to understanding, allowing themselves time “to be in the poem for a while. Maybe even having unfamiliarity, resistance, not understanding at times pass through us” (Zapruder 2010: 278). A poet himself, Zapruder illustrates his own way into a poem: In such cases, it is often helpful for me to remember that the word stanza comes from the Greek word for room, and verse from the Greek word for turn. If I think of the poem as something I am actually physically moving my consciousness through, from one line down to the next, and from one room to another, it helps me stay there, within what is being said. Giving myself that task to do helps keep me from translating and explaining everything in the poem as I am going along (Zapruder 2010: 278).



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Bearing in mind that the poetic text is not merely an exercise in formal language play but also a carrier of meaning, sound combinations and metaphors should be seen as language tools which help to create and shape such meaning, rather than obscuring devices (Kramsch 2004 [1993]). Another simple tip is to choose a poem which does not contain too many items that are far from the learner’s habitual ‘in use’ vocabulary, since any text that seems unfamiliar is unlikely to hold the reader’s attention. From a more practical point of view, the presence of unusual vocabulary may undoubtedly be challenging but it is certainly “wasteful of limited class time to explain so much that does not need to be retained.” (Tibbetts 2006 [1997]:104). Moreover, the language learning objective has to be evident to the students because, as in all educational contexts, “(i)f students know why they are doing something they are more likely to be motivated” (Tibbetts 2006 [1997]:104). It is interesting, therefore, to introduce poetic writing into the language classroom to elicit the language ‘tools’ poetry exploits most, while finding activities that make students aware of the opportunities which these tools also offer in ordinary communication.

3.3 Exploiting poems in the language class In the following paragraphs we attempt to highlight how the strengths of poetry can be exploited in language education. We have purposely decided to ‘cut up’ our reasoning into ‘small slices’ to enable the reader to ‘savour’ every ingredient a poem is made up of. There are many possible uses of poems and applications of poetry writing and translation in the context of language learning and we wish to try and eradicate the traditional prejudice against this literary genre. Poetry as “agent of change”, then, because: “It changes the way we think. It challenges previously held ideas and gives insights into other human beings. It is an important part of all languages and thus should be part of language learning” (Tibbetts 2006 [1997]: 105).

3.3.1 Rhythm Among other notable features, poetry writing rests on two aspects of language more than any other text genre: the ‘musical’ and the ‘evocative’. In Ezra Pound’s words: “(…) Poetry atrophies when it gets too far from music” (Pound 1961 [1934]: 61). Indeed, poetry is a kind of writing which is meant to evoke sensations and emotions through a particular use of the musical and connotative features of language.



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A poetic text is traditionally recognized by the special emphasis on the musical aspects of language: listening to a poem is akin to listening to a piece of music. Indeed, more than any other text form, a poem exploits the acoustic plane of human language and might be seen as a pattern of sound and sense (and occasionally vision); by artfully weaving these threads together the poet creates a sort of emotive path along which the reader is led (Barbieri 2011). Thinking of rhythm, the pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables is the result of pronouncing certain syllables with more prominence than others. In reading poetry, therefore, the unit of measure becomes the syllable (Jakobson 2006 [1960]).1 Without providing excessive information about meter, students should be shown how rhythm helps to construct meaning. Any poem which does not generate particular comprehension problems will be the perfect way to introduce learners to the importance of rhythm in constructing meaning. The following is by George Eliot: Count that day lost If you sit down at set of sun And count the acts that you have done, And, counting, find One self-denying deed, one word That eased the heart of him who heard, One glance most kind That fell like sunshine where it went Then you may count that day well spent. But if, through all the livelong day, You’ve cheered no heart, by yea or nay If, through it all You've nothing done that you can trace That brought the sunshine to one face No act most small That helped some soul and nothing cost Then count that day as worse than lost.

In spite of some rhetorical devices (for instance the simile “One glance most kind/that fell like sunshine…), the language employed remains within the literal and denotative sphere, allowing us to concentrate on the musical aspects of this poem. If the poem is not read with the appropriate rhythm, its meaning is obscured. Along with rhyme (see 3.3), it is the

 1

In the case of learners of English as a foreign language, poems can be a perfect means to elicit the importance of rhythm, since in English this is something which differs from other languages, and mostly depends on stress patterns.



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rhythm that helps the reader/listener to recognize the different tone of the two stanzas: the first gay and light, the second gloomy and condemning. Moreover, assonance (the repetition of the same or similar vowel sound), as in “heart/heard”, “day/nay”; alliteration (the repetition of the same sounds or of the same kind of sounds at the beginning of words or in the stressed syllables of a phrase), as in “set/sun”, “some/soul”, “heart/him/heard”; consonance (the close repetition of the same consonant sounds), as in “went/spent”, “cost/lost” and homophones (words that are pronounced the same but differ in their meaning and spelling) as in “son” and “sun”, “ice cream” and “I scream”, add flavour to the rhythm and create the acoustic dimension of this text.

3.3.2 Chunking and punctuation Thanks to poems of this type, learners understand the importance of chunking any text by pausing when required. This enables them to recognize patterns and understand meaning when the appropriate intonation and stress are applied, i.e. they learn that if the poem is not read with the appropriate rhythm, its meaning remains opaque. As Jakobson put it: “Only in poetry with its regular reiteration of equivalent units is the time of the speech flow experienced, as it is (…) with musical time” (Jakobson 2006 [1960]: 52). Poetry can also illustrate the role of punctuation. Punctuation marks signal the pauses both in prose and poetry writing, and to make sense of a text such pauses must be abided by. In poems pauses do not always occur at the end of a line as learners are erroneously led to think by the text structure. It is good practice to learn the function of punctuation, irrespective of the language in which one has to write. Electronic writing makes greater use of punctuation marks to convey the pauses present in oral communication, and interjections and emphasizers are also a common feature. A rapid reminder about the uses of punctuation marks in written communication is often both useful and welcome. In the poem above, Eliot uses enjambement, or the so-called ‘run-on-line’, i.e. the unit of meaning extends over two lines; therefore, good reading and meaning construction greatly depend on observing the pauses signalled by the commas and the dashes at the end of the lines.

3.3.3 Rhyme The other essential cue for poetry reading is rhyme. The rhyming scheme of Eliot’s poem is quite conventional, and commonly found in word play,



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proverbs and nursery rhymes, which also makes the poem easier to remember (Twinkle, twinkle little star…). Work on rhyming schemes improves pronunciation and is often quite challenging, especially when it involves internal rhyme. Here are the much cited verses from Percy Bysshe Shelley’s The Cloud, where the first and third lines contain internal rhyme while the second and fourth have the same final sound: I am the daughter of Earth and Water, And the nursling of the Sky; I pass through the pores of the ocean and shores; I change, but I cannot die.

Poems which rely heavily on the ‘sound’ or the acoustic dimension of language can be the basis for text-based activities aimed at improving pronunciation. This is always useful with English as a foreign language, to highlight the difference between spelling and pronunciation especially for those whose native languages do not possess this peculiarity: the rhyming of “sky” and “die” is not readily perceived by Spanish or Italian speakers unfamiliar with the basics of English pronunciation.

3.3.4 Translation The ‘musical’ dimension is also evident in translation activities. Since poetry, more than any other text genre, shows how translation is an act of (re)writing (see Bassnett and Bush eds. 2006, especially Chapter 9 by Scott and Chapter 14 by Bassnett), in most cases the musical dimension of the original text is lost or recreated by altering the meaning. This had already been observed by Schleiermacher in the nineteenth century, who argued that translating texts “in which the musical element of language that reveals itself in rhythm and alterations of tone is itself expressive and holds a higher meaning” generally consists in disregarding and destroying “the finest spirit, the highest magic of art in its most perfect works”. Schleiermacher’s paraphrasing, then, is not far from rewriting: For if what he loves in the work of art is more the ethical subject matter and its treatment, then he will be the less likely to note how often he has done an injustice to the metrical and musical elements of the form and, rather than thinking how to compensate for the loss, content himself with a rendering that tends ever more to lightness and, as it were, to paraphrase (Schleiermacher 1813 in Venuti 2012 [2000]: 52).



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The point is that today the translator’s work is trusted to be the best possible attempt at successful rendition, even when the translated text exhibits radical changes from the original (be this called paraphrasing or rewriting). Try as s/he may, the translator frequently has to surrender to the changes in musicality in the translated text. But, “(…) the issue in discussing a translated poem cannot be that it diverges from the original, but how it diverges – and, in diverging, what relationships, kinds and qualities, it sustains, or downplays, in relations with source text (…)” (Robinson 2010: 5). Contrastive analysis of source and target texts is an excellent group or individual activity. In line with the previous quotations, however, it should not be conducted in terms of what is lost of the original text, but of the solutions the translator has devised to recreate the evocative effect of the poem. Kramsch (2004 [1993]) also notices that multiple translations are the basis for useful activities on interpretation with the most advanced learners in multilingual contexts. The poem Felicità raggiunta (1925), by the Italian poet Eugenio Montale (1896–1981), can show how the musical dimension is lost in translation (the first verse will suffice to highlight our point): Felicità raggiunta, si cammina per te sul fil di lama. Agli occhi sei barlume che vacilla, al piede, teso ghiaccio che s’incrina; e dunque non ti tocchi chi più t’ama. Happiness, for you we walk on a knife edge. To the eyes you are a flickering light, to the feet, thin ice that cracks; and so may no one touch you who loves you.2

If in the original the metric scheme is based by the rhyme of the first line with the fourth and the second with the fifth (ABCAB), this dimension is completely lost in the translation, although the musicality is recreated by other devices (see below). Of course it is not only the acoustic effect which is difficult to reproduce in translation. Any language device exploited to express the poem’s meaning by departing from the denotative sphere is seldom identical in a target text, not only because any two linguistic systems rest on different

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Translation published in Knowles 1999: 528.

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patterns of phonetic and morphological features, but because the whole cultural system may differ. In Robinson’s words: “Those specific effects of form, structure, and meaning cannot by definition be reconstituted using materials of another set of interrelations from a different culture” (2010: 24). Any translation, therefore, produces a different original (Miller 1992): it “actualizes in a different manner the meaning potential of the original” (Kramsch 2004 [1993]: 168). In Montale’s poem, students of Italian as a second/foreign language should easily recognize the translator’s choice of the personal pronoun “we” to translate the impersonal “si”. This may lead readers of the English version to think this is a reference to two lovers, while the original text uses a form that leads to a generalization, i.e. the human being is willing to face any risk in the attempt to reach happiness. This divergence may prompt a debate on the differences in grammatical systems and how these affect meaning. A further subject of debate with students might be the loss of rhyme in the English text compensated by other sound effects that might be seen as positive or negative for the overall result: for instance, assonance, as in “knife/eyes/light/ice”, we/walk; onomatopoeia, as in “crack”, “flickering”; or repetition, as in “to the …”, which in Italian has a different effect, switching from the plural “agli occhi” to the singular “al piede”; or the reiterated “you” throughout the stanza and in the last line.

3.3.5 Meaning A poem which does not rely heavily on rhythm or rhyming exploits other language potentialities such as meaning, by playing on connotation to focus the reader’s attention on the theme. Evocative power is again common to any form of expression through language and is especially evident in poetry. Of course learners quite frequently ‘evoke’ someone/something by saying something else in their mother tongue (see for instance, the examples of advertisements, proverbs and sayings in § 5). But this does not mean that they are fully aware of such a device to build up meaning. By introducing a poem as “a hierarchically structured set of patterns of similarity and contrast” (Hanauer 2001 [quoting Jakobson 1960]: 111), you have a perfect ‘environment’ to practise the skill of meaning building through polysemantic reading and multiple interpretations. It is not difficult to devise activities based on the task of deciphering the meaning of a poem by inviting students to find the right clues through group activities such as focus groups (Hanauer, 2001 and 2007b).



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Indeed, poetry is the genre which best illustrates how language can evoke sensations and emotions by the simple use of words to communicate to our senses, especially the sense of sight. And awareness of the connotative dimension of language is one of the most important skills for communicating effectively. Sylvia Plath’s poem Metaphors (1959) elicits this language dimension: Metaphors I'm a riddle in nine syllables, An elephant, a ponderous house, A melon strolling on two tendrils. O red fruit, ivory, fine timbers! This loaf’s big with its yeasty rising. Money’s new-minted in this fat purse. I’m a means, a stage, a cow in calf. I’ve eaten a bag of green apples, Boarded the train there’s no getting off.

The poet plays with words to build a “riddle”, as she declares in the first line. Riddles are actually a perfect example of language used to evoke something which is never mentioned, and which is clearly the solution to the riddle itself. Therefore, Plath plays with this genre to create a poem which describes the state of pregnancy: she may in fact have been pregnant herself (Keefe 2007) while writing. The visual metaphors Plath uses in the first lines – “elephant”, “ponderous house”, “melon” – make the reader think of something large and clunky, bulky, heavy. Some metaphors of fertility then follow: “red fruit” (the biblical “fruit of thy womb”), “loaf” (“yeasty rising”), “money” (“new-minted in this fat purse”). The poem closes by evoking less positive feelings towards pregnancy: some metaphorical allusions seem to refer to the poet seeing herself as a “means” to give birth, the “stage” for a performance, the stage possibly alluding to an intermediate period in a finalized process, “a cow in calf” being a pregnant cow, a further reference to the writer feeling bulky and ungainly, like some dumb animal who has little say in her destiny. In the penultimate line we find another metaphor referring to the author’s pregnant state (eating a bag of green apples makes you feel heavy and burdened but this could also be a biblical allusion to Eve’s apple), and in the last line we find a reference to the ineluctability of pregnancy, like a train journey: once it has begun there is no turning back. Pregnancy is also evoked by the structure of the poem, consisting of nine lines each with nine syllables. Work on similar poems which try to construct “an identity in words” (Axelrod 1990: 4) could be a stimulating task for language learners. Plath’s



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poem rests on images of pregnancy common to all Western cultures: it is easy to solve the riddle by finding the clues in the poem. Contemporary poetry offers many examples of poems suitable for building text-based meaning construction activities. This means revising traditional activities related to poetry and adopting an inductive approach based on autonomous line by line reading, allowing students time to engage with the text and to seize the many interwoven aspects which make up a work of poetry.

3.3.6 Poetry writing Before going on to examine the other side of the coin – poetry writing – it is worth mentioning Hanauer’s experiments on poetry reading as a meaning construction activity. The author of numerous studies on the use of poetry in the language classroom, he argues that meaning construction in a poem implies “high levels of close consideration, analysis and elaboration of textual meanings” (Hanauer 2001b: 320). Experiments conducted on the meaning construction processes enacted by second language readers while reading poetry have shown that such challenging tasks can be highly beneficial, as reported in Hanauer 2010. The participants in Hanauer’s experiment on poetry reading as a “meaning construction task” were mostly attracted by unusual grammatical use and patterns of repetition in the poem being analysed – Leonard Cohen’s Suzanne. The subsequent construction of meaning “involved resorting to world knowledge and to a form of cultural negotiation in which readers explored new potential cultural meanings, which indicated a process of personal discovery.” (Hanauer 2010: 35) The participating students were non experts in literary analysis and this probably helped to focus their attention on linguistic clues to construct meaning: “In other words, they demonstrated ability to recognize aspects of aesthetic textual manipulation (such as rhyme) and used it in the actual meaning construction process” (Hanauer 2010: 35). Hanauer also has something to say about poetry writing as a tool in language education which is of interest in Second Language Learning. Some creative writing activities in a foreign language teaching environment might prove less awkward than expected.3 Of course much depends on the level of competence, but it is sufficient to ensure that students are familiar with the basic features of this genre to exploit the potential poetry writing



3 On the uses of poetry to enhance English language learning at all ages and levels of competence see the essays in Falvey and Kennedy 2006 [1997] about the Hong Kong reality. As will be evident from the works cited in this chapter, it is a fact that poetry is more employed in Asian educational contexts and its uses more investigated there than in other parts of the world. 



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has in terms of language awareness. Of course finding the right words to match the chosen structure of your text might prove challenging; it is therefore up to the teacher to prepare students by getting away from the focus on their performance in terms of language competence and helping them to consider poetry writing as similar to the writing of other texts. And since poetry is more demanding, such practice will prove to be beneficial to written competence as a whole. The careful selection of a theme which may raise the learners’ interests and feelings is enough to prompt students to jot down what they feel. In Poetry as Research: Exploring Second Language Poetry Writing, Hanauer comments on the following untitled poem by a Chinese student of EFL (2010: 102), which highlights the power of poetry writing to exploit language and express inner and frequently unrevealed feelings and emotions: I’m using the language, I don’t know what I mean I’m thinking with a five thousand year language Translating them into a simple world language I’m writing poems It is me If you know what I am talking about

Poetry writing may be seen as a process of self-discovery, “self knowledge” in Hanauer’s words. Here, the writer describes the process through which the student’s text is built by thinking in her mother tongue (“a five thousand year language”) and translating her thoughts into English (“a simple world language”). Her feelings towards English are revealed by the status attached to it – “a simple world language” – compared to her ancient mother tongue. And the first line, “I’m using the language, I don’t know what I mean”, reveals her lack of self-confidence. In spite of all this uncertainty and uneasiness with English, she asserts her identity by saying “It is me”, as if she wanted to say “I am using English to communicate”, and at the same time evokes empathy by concluding “If you know what I am talking about”, as if to say she wants to share this feeling with all those who use English as a second language like her. Hanauer is especially interested in the benefits of poetry writing for advanced second language learners. Referring to the subject of literary awareness (Fecteau 1999; Hall 2005; Zyngier 1994), Hanauer analyses the results of his class experiment and argues that by writing, reading and interpreting their own poetry, advanced learners demonstrate that they know how to manipulate linguistic information to construct meaning, and this activity involves them personally and emotionally (Hanauer 2010). Writ-



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ing poetry involves coming to terms with the connotative language dimension and encourages students to move away from the tendency to rely on the literal to express meaning. One poetic form that might be particularly challenging is the haiku. The traditional haiku is a three-line poem with seventeen syllables, written in a 5/7/5 syllable pattern; it is written in the present tense, it is generally about nature, evoking simplicity and intensity at the same time through the associations of images. When reading a haiku you see the image as if you were suddenly illuminated by the words, as in the following classic Japanese haiku: the old pond a frog jumps in water’s sound4

Though it is not easy to write haikus, students should feel encouraged by their apparent simplicity: this form of poetic writing is particularly suitable for contexts of English as a foreign language because of its simple and flexible structure made up of a pair of contrasting images plus observation (Finch 2003). As an effective exercise on the use of language, haiku writing is favoured by several teachers and researchers, especially in Asia and the USA (Finch 2003; Hanauer 2010, 2011; Iida 2012a, 2012b; Kramsch 2004 [1993]). It has been the object of experiments in language teaching contexts that have shown how haiku writing develops linguistic awareness and helps to build vocabulary and choose the most appropriate lexical items to give voice to emotions and feelings: (…) the development of L2 linguistic awareness can be seen as a result of the participants’ negotiations of meaning construction in a structurally designed format. Haiku composition requires the writers to choose lexical items in order to adjust the 5-7-5 syllable patterns. For instance, when the writers encounter a situation in which their chosen words do not fit the syllable pattern, they are expected to find an alternative, look up in a dictionary, understand its usage and meaning, confirm how it works, and decide to use it in texts (Iida 2012a: 1482-1483).

As in any instance of poetry writing, preparatory work should comprise activities like group work to help students recognize emotions and feelings

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The translation (by W.J. Higginson) is reported as the closest to the original by Gill 2009. Many books have been devoted to the over 100 translations of Bashǀ’s haikus. The web, too, is worth a visit to realize how widely debated the translation of haikus is, as well as to find inspiration for language activities. 



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and enable them to put them into words. Iida’s survey also shows how difficult self-expression is for the students concerned (40% resist writing L2 haiku) (Iida 2012a). Giving students a structure can complicate matters and, at higher levels of competence, this might be the real challenge. A task like haiku writing might be envisaged as a form of wordplay with directions that need to be followed in order to succeed. Iida’s research was conducted with Japanese university students of English as a foreign language who had previously studied haiku composition at school. This should not discourage the introduction of haiku writing with students from different cultural backgrounds, because western writers also write haiku-like poems working on powerful associations to create images. Ezra Pound’s famous “In a Station of the Metro,” is a much cited example: The apparition of these faces in the crowd; Petals on a wet, black bough.

Many other Western poets have followed Pound’s example and, over time, the rules for haiku writing have loosened; directions might therefore be adapted to class level. Learners have to be well prepared for haiku writing with reading tasks geared to highlighting the characteristics of this particular genre such as conciseness of expression and imagery along with the need to adhere to a strict pattern. Kramsch 2004 [1993] also mentions haiku as the basis for language activities. More specifically, she reports on activities to recast the contents of a poem in a different literary form with reference to a classroom experiment during a seminar for language teachers whose task was to reformulate a poem by Robert Frost into a haiku-like text. It is possible and even fruitful to work on poetic texts in the language classroom both to create task-based activities of the meaning construction type and to encourage a more creative use of language which exploits all its musical and evocative potentialities, well beyond the denotative sphere. What Kramsch 2004 [1993] observes about poetry writing can be extended to poetry listening and poetry reading, both as an individual and as a social experience: poetry offers learners the “opportunity to test the limits of available meanings within their restricted linguistic resources. It enables them to verbalize a familiar experience in unfamiliar words and thereby change the meaning of that experience” (Kramsch 2004 [1993]: 171).



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3.4 Other types of poetic language The expression “poetic language” is widely used beyond the literary genre to refer to any use of language which significantly rests upon acoustic effects and phonetic phenomena, careful word choice and syntactic arrangement to allow the reader/listener/speaker to feel what the author wishes to convey. Genres like nursery rhymes, chants, schoolyard games, songs, advertising slogans and jingles show how accustomed we are to accompanying the verbal component of such texts with variations of tone: we emphasize sounds, rhythmic sequences and patterns to attract attention while conveying meaning (Wainwright 2011 [2005]). Roman Jakobson warned against restricting the poetic function, i.e. the focus on the message itself, merely to poetry: Any attempt to reduce the sphere of poetic function to poetry or to confine poetry to poetic function would be a delusive oversimplification. Poetic function is not the sole function of verbal art but only its dominant, determining function, whereas in all other verbal activities it acts as a subsidiary, accessory constituent (Jakobson 2006 [1960]: 51).

The poetic function pertains to any text, but in varying degrees depending on its dominant aim: all language is intrinsically ‘poetic’, every text has a poetic component which is expressed by aesthetic features and there is no point in treating this expressive modality as if it were “a peculiar, demarcated zone out of the mainstream of language-use” (Wainwright 2011 [2004]: 5): “wherever we feel the need for heightened, deliberate speech, wherever there is a need for ‘something to be said’, we turn to the unusual shapes and sounds of poetry”. In most cases, this special form of language is used to foreground a particular message, to raise attention in much the same way as gestures; this is why the poetic form may be adopted on particular occasions to highlight a state of mind exactly as “gestural language” (Wainwright 2011 [2004]). Actually, on such occasions as weddings or funerals, when we want to express strong feelings and emotions, we recur to stereotyped formulae and to poetic or gestural language to express ourselves (Wainwright 2011 [2004]). The language use which is generally ascribed to poetry is also frequently found in argumentative and persuasive texts which form an integral part of our everyday life. Cook (2003 [1996]), for instance, points to the language play present in newspaper headlines: “Sense and Censorship”; “October set for record frrreeze” are two examples he gives. He is particularly concerned with the language of tabloids, arguing that some



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very awkward uses of language might be likened to other forms of writing we recognize as art: “The persistent language play is something which the tabloids share with comedy, song, graffiti and of course literature” (Cook 2003 [1996]: 215). His acceptance of this form of writing as a form of language art is a perfect argument in favour of the use of any form of text whose focus is on form in the language class, from the highest example of literature to the most trivial text, provided it is consistent with the learning objective: Consideration of language play in the tabloids may help us to confront some of the central issues concerning the circumstances in which language play deserves to be called language art, for the tabloid combination of linguistic inventiveness and dexterity with banal subject matter or objectionable opinion highlights the question of the degree to which clever form should serve content and the degree to which form may even become content (Cook 2003 [1996]: 217).

These remarks may be extended to advertisements, which similarly rely heavily on sound effects to foreground the commercial message with highly creative solutions. Take one of the Mars campaigns, implemented throughout the Western world, that adopts the strategy of rhymed slogans in different languages. To maintain the rhyme, the message changes from language to language: “A Mars a day helps you work, rest and play” – Australia “Mars, pleasure you can’t measure” – Europe “Un coup de barre? Mars et ça repart!” (Feeling beat? A Mars and you’re off again!) – France “Nimm Mars, gib Gas” (Take Mars, step on the gas) – Germany “Mars, momento di vero godimento” (Mars, a moment of pure enjoyment) – Italy

There are many possible examples which can be found by simply surfing the Web: looking for texts – ads, songs, jingles, sayings, etc. – which exploit sounds and musical effects to catch the reader’s attention could be a learners’ assignment designed to stimulate awareness of language play and/or rhyme and other acoustic effects which can be found in ordinary communication.



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Proverbs and idioms are proof that musicality is part of everyday language, and inviting students to find appropriate correspondences in their mother tongue will help to highlight the difficulty of keeping the message unaltered, since rhyme and other acoustic effects created by alliteration, repetition etc. are frequently lost (see §3.4). This emerges clearly in the following English/Italian pairs: When the cat is away the mice will play / quando il gatto non c’è i topi ballano. A friend in need, is a friend indeed / un amico si vede nel momento del bisogno. Dimmi con chi vai, e ti dirò chi sei / a man is known by the company he keeps. Rosso di sera, bel tempo si spera / red sky at night, shepherd’s (or sailor’s) delight.

While not being translation proper, such contrastive activity on existing pairs encourages the learner to reflect on the differences in the perlocutionary effects of equivalent texts in two different languages. The advent of rock and roll redirected attention to words and meanings and songs began to be read as texts in themselves, quite apart from feats of musical prowess. Singers like Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen “downplayed both musical accompaniment and visual presentation, thus foregrounding the potential literariness of their lyrics” (Cook 2003 [1996]: 205). Such songs can be successfully employed for language learning purposes, as they possess the same potentialities as lyrical poems while being more attractive for young adults. Teachers frequently employ song listening to teach or practise pronunciation, and to illustrate the differences between orthographic and phonetic representations. Moreover, the use of song scripts is important from the cultural point of view since students can identify cultural models as they appear in songs and also discuss them in a multicultural setting (Finch 2003). A song gains popularity all over the world due to its musicality, and non-mother tongue students might not even be aware of the message the text wishes to convey. Meaning construction activities foreground the message and raise awareness of the possible ideological impact of a song depending on the type of listener (age, culture, sociocultural background), her/his language competence, and the context in which it is listened to.



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3.5 Poetry as the texture for many tasks In this chapter we have offered some suggestions on how to use poetry as a linguistic resource to create task-based activities within a general inductive approach to learning. In line with the approach adopted throughout the book, poetry can become the texture from which to forge tasks based on problem solving through discussion and negotiation. Students of any age and with any kind of language learning requirements (first, second or foreign) will benefit from such activities. By carefully selecting a specific genre (poem, ballad, limerick, nursery rhyme, jingle, song, etc.) and, within that genre, the most suitable text to reach the set learning objective, a successful outcome is guaranteed. In Montale’s words, obscurity is not a feature of good poetry, since poets instinctively observe that juste milieu between understanding nothing and understanding too much: (…) tra il non capir nulla e il capir troppo c’è una via di mezzo, un juste milieu che i poeti, d’istinto, rispettano più dei loro critici; ma al di qua o al di là di questo margine non c’è salvezza né per la poesia né per la critica. C’è solo una landa troppo oscura o troppo chiara (…) (Montale 1996: 1493). There is a middle road between understanding nothing and understanding too much, a juste milieu which poets instinctively respect more than their critics; but on this side or that of the border there is no safety for either poetry or criticism. There is only a wasteland too dark or too bright (…).5

We believe that identifying that juste milieu is the teacher’s task. Only by selecting appropriate texts as a starting point will s/he pave the way to the students’ success.

 ͷ



Translation by Jonathan Galassi, reported in Ormsby 2001: 182.



CHAPTER FOUR PLAYING A PART: DRAMA IN THE LANGUAGE CLASSROOM

What dramatic speech shares with ordinary speech in an everyday dialogue is the fact that it is intimately bound up with the immediate context or situation that the participants in the dialogue find themselves in. – Manfred Pfister, The Theory and Analysis of Drama, 1993 [1988]

4.1 On educational drama In the following section, we will briefly report on the use of drama (and dramatization) in language education. To do so, we will widen our perspective to include educational drama at large,1 since most of the activities related to this concept have been adopted in different pedagogical contexts to improve communicative skills, favour interaction, increase motivation and contain emotive and affective blocks. As is commonly acknowledged in the field of classical studies, the relationship between drama and education dates back to Greek theatre: drama was considered as an educational instrument, and practitioners of drama as teachers (Tschurtschenthaler 2013; especially chapter one for a survey on the history of this relationship up to the present). Drama is generally acknowledged to be: “The form of composition designed for performance in the theatre, in which actors take the roles of the characters, perform the indicated actions, and utter the written dialogue” (Abrams 1999 [1957]: 69). ‘Drama’ in a pedagogical

 1

We here borrow this label to refer to any application of drama in an educational context. However, educational drama is not necessarily related to language education and it is generally employed with reference to early and young learners. The name is also used in a more strict sense as a synonym of “Process Drama” (see the following pages). In a recent publication on the subject, Tschurtschenthaler (2013) argues that ‘Drama in Education’ (‘DiE’) is more popular than Educational Drama, and even if the latter is a broader term, the former is frequently employed as a synonym. We still prefer Educational Drama and value it as being widely used in the educational context.



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context goes well beyond this definition, and while embracing the activities which foreground the production of a theatrical work, it is first of all a learning tool. Drama activities do not necessarily make use of a theatrical text: although a play may be successfully employed for pedagogical purposes (see for instance Cheng Yi-Mei and Winston 2011 on Shakespeare in the classroom of English as a second language), most of the class activities and projects which go under the label of educational drama are not related to literary works. Nonetheless, “in drama class a fictional world is constructed” (Li-Yu Chang 2012: 8), and it is in this creative dimension that we find the relation with the essence of literature.

4.2 Defining drama The EU-funded project about educational drama DICE (Drama Improves Lisbon Key Competences in Education) attempts to draw a line between theatre proper and drama by distinguishing the two in the following terms: In theatre, A (the actor/enactor) plays B (the role/performance) to C (the audience) who is the beneficiary. Drama, on the other hand, is not as concerned with the learning of theatreskills, or production, as it is with the construction of imagined experience. Drama creates dramatic situations to be explored by the participants, inviting them to find out more about the process of how the situation comes into being, to shift perspectives in the here and now, identify and sometimes solve problems and deepen our understanding of them. (…) In drama, A (the actor/enactor) is simultaneously B (role) and C (audience) through participation and observation, in a process of percipience (a process of both observing and participating) (DICE 2008).

If, from our perspective, the imaginative and creative dimension attached to drama is what relates the latter to literature, as we will see, most of the works on drama do not draw a sharp distinction between the two, and actually treat learning experiences of both types under the headings of drama, dramatization or educational drama. In line with most of the literature on drama in language learning, we feel that the “learning of theatre skills or production” may be beneficial to learners in itself and/or as the natural completion of a creative activity. Another important point to clarify is that in the field of language learning the concept of drama sometimes overlaps with role play and simulation. Many attempts have been made to define the three and their intrinsic relationship. In the entry “Drama” for the Routledge Encyclopedia of Language Learning and Teaching edited by Byram (2004), Fleming mentions among the drama forms in a language learning context: typical exercis-



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es/warm-up games, which imply an acting-out component; improvised role play on a dialogue written by the participants in advance; scripted role play with the dialogue written for the participants in advance; and more extended drama simulations based on students creating fictitious characters in a given context. Fleming therefore includes in the concept of drama both simulation and role-play. While all those activities defined as simulation, role-play, simulation-game, role-play simulation, or role-playing game (Crookall and Oxford, 1990) are part of what we mean when we refer to drama in the foreign language classroom, some tend to draw a distinction between simulation and role play on the assumption that the former “simulates” real life situations, while the latter is essentially aimed at allowing a participant to experience one of the many character types s/he may meet in everyday life (Scarcella and Oxford, 1992). Though always including an element of role-play, simulation is seen as a complex, lengthy and not very flexible activity, while role-play tends to be flexible, brief and simple in structure (Ladousse 1987). As to drama or dramatization, they are generally seen as less creative than role play, more constraining, more similar to simulation and even less flexible because of having to abide by the script when playing the assigned role: no creativity, then, no space for imagination and individual variations (Ladousse 1987). This distinction seems not to include any creative work, certainly not creative writing, among activities related to drama in language education. 2 Simulation is also frequently perceived as a broader concept which may embrace the other two and which undoubtedly facilitates second language acquisition in whatever form it may take (see the literature review in Scarcella and Crookall 1990). We view any application of drama as necessarily related to some simulation and some form of role-play too: we are interested in the “active and creative part of entering the as-if situation” (Tschurtschenthaler 2013: 31). In line with the prevailing aim of this book to investigate and critically revise the possible benefits deriving from literature-based language learning activities, we reject an excessively stringent view of drama. As already stated, the whole procedure which brings about a dramatic performance has to be foregrounded: drama, or better dramatization, implies negotiation within a community of learners. Anyone in her/his role – writer(s), director(s) costume designer(s), actors and even the public – participates, from writing to performing, from backstage to stage. Rehearsals, with all the

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This is exactly what distinguishes drama from theatre according to the above mentioned DICE project. See also the descriptions of drama activities in Wilburn 1992: 71-72.



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necessary choices – from costumes to scenes, from voice and intonation to gestures and movements across the space on the stage, etc. – imply negotiation within the group and creativity, to perform ‘playing in role’ (which is typical of role play: Ladousse 1987). Within the concept of drama we also include the creation of a text (as in role play); but even when in the presence of an assigned dramatic text, whether one pertaining to the literature of a country or one created by the teacher, the phase of collective reading focused on understanding the text and interpreting the different layers of meaning is a precious one. Interest in the possible applications of drama for language learning and more generally for education is not recent (among the studies dating back to the ’90s Slade 1954; Pross 1986; Di Pietro 1987; Crookall and Oxford 1990; Tarlington and Verriour 1991; Scarcella and Oxford 1992; Jung 1993; Fleming 1994 and 1997; Byram and Fleming 1998; Kao and O’ Neill 1998; Wagner 1998; Winston 1998; Podlozny 2000). Many studies embrace a wider pedagogical perspective and/or are interdisciplinary. Most of the arguments set out in these works are still convincing and have been re-proposed in more recent publications: from the turn of the century to the present day interest in educational drama, especially in connection to language, has been a constant, with new interesting perspectives appearing in very recent works (Fitzgibbon 1993; Bräuer 2002; Anderson, Hughes and Manuel 2008; and the special issue of RIDE: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance: “Drama and Second Language Learning” 2011, edited by Stinson and Winston, which at the time of writing is to be published in a 2014 Routledge volume).3

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For a more ‘hands-on’ approach, the previously mentioned work by Fleming 2004 offers a lot of useful suggestions, together with Maley and Duff who in 1978 published a resource book for teachers developing communicative activities mainly devoted to oral expression, voice, and vocabulary. The successful Oxford University Press “Resource Books for Teachers” series, edited by Maley, also includes a book about drama by Charlyin Wessels (2003 [1987]). The suggestions presented are well worth a look, ranging from “drama games” to using drama for improving pronunciation or spoken communication skills. An entire section is devoted to the setting up of a drama project: by reporting the students’ comments, the author highlights the benefits of working on the process rather than on the final product, namely the advantages to language growth and consolidation derived from informal conversation during a rehearsal. The most recent publication about drama practice in language learning is Winston 2012: it is devoted to second language learning and collects a series of essays about drama practice as an engaging activity for learning. A number of best practices are described, presenting language in context, favouring collaborative work, and allowing for the physical representation of ideas. 



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Focus on and evaluation of the process (the learners’ procedural work and its value in constructing meaning, understanding and knowledge) rather than of the product (the learners’ final production, the play itself or any portion of it) is a recurring feature in recently published works on drama in education, in line with the basic guidelines of the current pedagogical perspective. This is a key consideration when applying drama to a language learning context: from the use of informal conversation in the preparation phase, to the many other opportunities that come to bear when employing drama as a general framework, emphasis has to be on all the passages and collateral activities which are part of the process rather than the outcome. Dramatic interpretation demands activation of the whole self: voice, intonation, rhythm, and all the linguistic skills (phonetics, grammar, semantics, vocabulary), non-verbal semiotic and kinetic elements such as physical action, body movements and gestures, position in space, relation with context, mental, creative and artistic skills. Indeed, “(…) encouraging language teachers to venture into imaginative worlds and include a kinaesthetic dimension to their communicative practice could improve engagement and outcomes for beginner learners” (Rothwell 2011: 575). While drama with young learners and/or with beginners has been extensively investigated, we believe such benefits regard any type of learner and any type of language which is the object of acquisition. Indeed, what characterizes first language acquisition Ȃ “improved spontaneity, fluency, articulation, vocabulary, and a greater use of language registers; increases in rarely used vocabulary, improved grammar and narrative structures” (Wagner 1998: 479) Ȃ may also be found in a second/foreign language learning context, as shown by the many published works and surveys, especially in the field of early and young language education (among the many, Anderson, Hughes and Manuel 2008; Bournot-Trites, Belliveau, Spiliotopoulos and Séror 2007; DeCoursey 2012; Dunn and Stinson 2012; Rothwell 2011; Silver, Goh and Alsagoff 2009; Stinson and Winston 2011; Winston 2012; and Wilburn 1992 specifically regarding drama in immersion classes).

4.3 Drama in the current pedagogical trends Most of the issues central to language education theory and practice appear in combination with drama in current publications: a. the contextual factors; b. the role of motivation, imagination and emotion; c. intercultural issues; d. collaborative and collective approaches.



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a. Many authors point to the connections between drama-related activities and those related to language learning on the grounds that both drama and language are context dependent. Clearly, drama is made up of language and, as with any other use of language, it depends on both the participants and the context, which in this case is ‘simulated’. Taking into account the possible differences of the type of educational context – first, second, foreign language, age of learners, physical context, teachers’ expertise, and so on – drama has been greatly appreciated for directing attention to context as a key element in communication: “Drama can provide a powerful motivation to speech, and this speech does not occur in isolation but is embedded in context and situation where it has a crucial function” (O’Neill and Lambert 1990 [1982]: 18). .

b. From the perspective of learning as a meaning construction process, along the lines of Vygotsky (1978) and Bruner (1990), drama may be considered an important tool to actively transfer knowledge to learners, so that each participant may interpret and build meaning by experiencing information, new knowledge and new worlds. Any dramatic text may serve as a starting point for exploiting the role of imagination and emotion in language learning: the imaginative and emotional enhancing function of drama makes it a successful learning tool because students have to imagine themselves in different social roles (Wagner 2002). As they “get caught up in the emotion of the dramatic activity, they are often able to express themselves in a more mature manner and language than they could otherwise” (Wagner 2002: 9-10).4 This is all the more significant following Damasio 1994’s findings on the importance of working on emotions in learning and the role they play on memory (Immordino-Yang and Faeth 2010). Following the successful approach generated by Stephen Krashen’s Monitor model of second language acquisition, Pross 1986 illustrates how theatre games may be purposely designed and successfully employed “to divert the focus from self-conscious monitoring, and can be a valuable tool in freeing channels blocked by psychological discomfort” (Pross 1986: 35). The added value of such practices is measured by the degree of involvement and motivation the learning practice is able to achieve: more than one author points out how the contrast between the role and intentions

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Emotional and affective involvement in drama activities has also been viewed as a way to reduce learners’ anxiety while learning and using a second language (Piazzoli 2011).



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of different characters is sufficient to generate a “tension” which is stimulating for the actors/learners (Di Pietro 1987; Kao and O’Neill 1998). c. The relation between drama and language education has also been investigated from the intercultural perspective. Already in 1998 Byram and Fleming devoted a book to the approaches to language learning in an intercultural perspective through drama and ethnography (Bräuer 2002; Schneider, Crumpler and Rogers 2006; Rothwell 2011 followed). Nowadays language learning is invariably strictly related to learning about other cultures in order to allow students to communicate easily in their ever more multicultural homelands and across (cultural) frontiers. Language learners need to develop a sensitivity towards cultural difference and to be aware of its impact on communication; they must acquire an ability to discover and interpret other cultures, other values, beliefs and behaviours which lie beneath the surface of cross-cultural communication. Drama helps to develop cultural awareness by leading learners to build up cultural sensitivity and the ability to recognize and interpret different cultural features such as habits, behaviours, values, and so on, in order to communicate effectively (Bournot-Trites, Belliveau, Spiliotopoulos and Séror 2007; Byram and Fleming 1998). d. The approach we favour and which seems to encompass the others, is that of seeing dramatization as a collective activity which offers many tools to the teacher who is willing and able to recognize and exploit them. Indeed, collective activities and group practices based on cooperation allow for exposure to different ways of seeing, knowing and representing and to fruitful exchanges among members who consequently broaden their outlook and eventually bring to bear common views, knowledge and representations (Nieto 2001). The teacher’s role is often highlighted as that of a “structural agent”, who nonetheless acknowledges the participants’ influence on the activity and its outcome (Wilburn 1992). In Dunn and Stinson’s recent study, the teacher’s artistry and valuable pre-text materials are considered to be of the utmost importance for a successful outcome: without such tools, the impact of drama is reduced to that of more widespread practices. Nonetheless we would say that drama projects and activities in language education, even when not carefully designed, may be conducive to a framework of collaborative learning, provided the teacher works on enhancing interaction among pairs, while leaving room for improvisation and changes of direction inspired by the learners’ reactions and behaviours.



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One technique that has been particularly investigated for its cognitive, social and affective value is “process drama” (Di Pietro 1987; Wagner 1988; O’Neill 1992-1995; Kao and O’Neill 1998; Bowell and Heap 2001; Schneider, Crumpler and Rogers 2006; Taylor and Warner 2006; Stinson and Freebody 2009). This consists in the progressive creation of a dramatic world through the joint work of teacher(s) and learners. The collaborative work of exploring fictional roles and situations results in improved language skills due to the students’ efforts to express their insights in order to be understood by the other participants. The starting point of process drama is a pre-text which sets the theme or situation around which an episode or chain of episodes are created and rehearsed: “Teachers and students co-create the dramatic ‘elsewhere’, a fictional world, for experiences, insights, interpretations, and understandings to occur” (Liu 2002: 55). The teacher is actively involved in taking a role and thus has the opportunity to help students, guide their insights and also evaluate their language performance indirectly.

4.4 A few more tips Having reviewed the relevant literature in the field of language learning, and enlarged our perspective to include other views from different educational contexts, we readily endorse the potentialities of what we have defined educational drama as a means to enhance the learner’s knowledge, self-confidence, and communicative and interactional skills. One only has to single out one phase in the process, with the product being represented by a script or its performance and reception, to see rewarding results. Of course, we recommend that each single phase of dramatization be worked on, from creative writing to staging. Writing a script entails a prewriting phase during which a story emerges. The teacher may also direct the activity by outlining a starting point, be it a simple sentence, a character, a place, an epoch or a whole story. In any case learners are involved in a lot of negotiation: they have to communicate, exchange views, find solutions, agree on a plot before defining the script. The script itself is made up of descriptions, directions and dialogues: different genres which may be practised, leading to the acquisition of a meta-competence in a learning by doing framework. Indeed collective playwriting generates a lot of informal interaction which is of great benefit to oral skills5 and vocabulary, both during the prewriting phase and while writing down the complete script.

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See, for example, Encabo Fernandez, Varela Tembra and López Valero 2008 for activities at primary school level.



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Improvisation activities arising from a given suggestion are also of great interest for fostering communicative competence and interactional skills. As outlined in the previous pages, any theatrical work may be adapted to the set language objectives, from the great masterpieces of the past to contemporary works. Putting a text on stage necessarily requires a considerable amount of language work, from the pre-stage phase of reading the text and interpreting the various characters, which implies negotiation within the group to decide how to represent a character, a situation, etc; to rehearsals, involving work on gestures, intonation, movement on the stage, etc.; to the final, crucial, stage in the complex learning path, i.e. the performance, where all the participants can see their efforts rewarded. Last but not least the opportunity to experience the physical aspect of communication is worth a mention: drama activities have the peculiarity of making use of the whole body, i.e. of being a “multimodal form of pedagogy” (Winston 2012: 4). As Rothwell 2011 points out, interaction, just like dramatic conventions, is always multimodal. The audience may also gain benefits from a drama activity by ‘playing the role’ of critical listeners (Bailin 1998). And a final phase of revision and commentary may fruitfully close the experience by reuniting all the perspectives which made the dramatic performance possible. Once again, it is a case of process over product, though the product, possibly a masterpiece, can now be approached with simplicity without the ‘aura’ which generally hangs over literary-based approaches. Theatre as text to be read, theatre as text to be performed, theatre as text written and performed by students, theatrical improvisation: each of these applications of drama to language pedagogy is a precious opportunity for the language teacher.





CHAPTER FIVE FOUND IN TRANSLATION: CONTRASTIVE LANGUAGE ANALYSIS AS THE BASIS FOR COMPARATIVE LITERATURE

The marginality of translation reaches even to educational institutions, where it is manifested in a scandalous contradiction: on the one hand, an utter dependence on translated texts in curricula and research; on the other hand, a general tendency, in both teaching and publications, to elide the status of translated texts as translated, to treat them as texts originally written in the translating language. When students see that translation is not simple communication, but an appropriation of the foreign text to serve domestic purposes, they can come to question the appropriative movements in their own encounters with foreign cultures. – Lawrence Venuti, “Translation and the Pedagogy of Literature”, 1996

5.1. On ‘applied’ translation criticism The aim of this chapter may have appeared slightly off the main track to those readers who started their journey through this volume in the traditional way, i.e. by consulting the index. In our intention, though, it should complement and complete our path through literary texts in search of valuable materials for the language class, by showing how a principled application of translation criticism (among others, Dodds 1985, 1992; Berman 1995; Mattioli 1996; Reiss 2000) can help to exploit the teaching potential of (translated) literary texts in a foreign language learning environment. The other focus of the chapter (and this is our starting point) will be the contribution that ‘applied’ translation criticism can offer to the study of comparative literature, which – we believe – in turn affects intercultural education. In previous works we have attempted to embrace the practice of looking at the translated text as an autonomous text endowed with its own dignity (Di Martino 2010; Di Martino 2011a, b, c; Di Martino 2012; Di



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Martino 2014; Di Martino a and b; Di Martino and Pavani 2013), as advocated by those who view translation criticism as a specific field of enquiry, distinct from literary criticism. We feel however that investigation in the field has up until recently remained divorced from its applied aspect and has consequently disregarded the advantages for foreign language learning and intercultural studies of a different kind of critical work, primarily aimed at understanding where the target text stands in relation to the source text, and wholly devoid of any attempt to judge the translator’s work.

5.1.1 The contribution of translation studies to comparative literature: from Bassnett’s ‘flawed’ predictions to Apter’s view of translation as the core of comparative literature The relationship between comparative literature and translation studies undoubtedly exists and it is not an easy one. Starting with Apter’s comments on Derrida referring to “Translation and the question of comparative literature” (during a seminar de Man had invited him to teach at Yale in 1979-1980) as “Le concept de littérature comparée et les problèmes théoriques de la traduction” (in Apter 2010: 42), academics have often lacked objectivity and the necessary detachment, doubtless in an attempt to favour one over the other. Bassnett’s 1993 obituary – “Today, comparative literature in one sense is dead” (1993: 47) – may be taken as the epitome of this debate. Indeed, it was only with the so-called ‘cultural turn’ in the ’90s that translation studies moved from a marginal area of study within comparative literature to a quasi-discipline playing a vital role in literary history as a whole and quickly gaining recognition as a branch of linguistics, as had already occurred with text or discourse analysis. Bassnett observes that great periods of literary innovation tend to be preceded by periods of intense translation activity, thus inviting us to “look upon translation studies as the principle discipline from now on, with comparative literature as a valued but subsidiary subject area” (Bassnett 1993: 161). In spite of Bassnett’s later dismissal of her statement as ‘flawed’ and deliberately provocative (she actually embraced a view of both comparative literature and translation studies not as independent disciplines but, rather, as “methods of approaching literature, ways of reading that are mutually beneficial”; Bassnett, 2006: 6), this 1993 pronouncement gave rise to considerable reaction: it was in 2003 that another provocative decease was pronounced by Spivak, though in this case it simultaneously called for rebirth in a new cross-disciplinary shape (2003).



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In the first decade of the new century Apter contributed to the debate by advocating “a program for a new comparative literature using translation as a fulcrum” (2006: 243), thus giving rise to a view of translation as a tool to approach comparative literature. Indeed, Apter’s view is part of a wider attempt at rethinking the humanities after 9/11 which also comprises “the mapping of languages ‘in translation’”, with special reference to the relationship between language and war and the issue of creolisation (Apter 2006: 243). Though this perspective may seem to have little to do with study focusing on the most-widely spoken languages, reflection on the issue of linguistic and cultural creolisation calls for a wider concept of literature(s) which goes well beyond the view of literature as the form of a nation’s artistic expression. It is an invitation to revise the approach to a literary product as the expression of an easily identifiable people, epoch, location, etc., in favour of a focus on less standard aspects from both a linguistic and a cultural point of view. As D’Hulst points out: (…) literatures were predominantly understood as monolingual ‘national’ constructs. Time has come to open up new perspectives into the study of intranslation of literary texts (or parts of texts) produced in non-standard language (such as dialects), of texts belonging to earlier strata of the system (such as medieval texts), of texts belonging to minority literatures (such as creole literature in the Europhone Caribbean space), etc. (D’Hulst 2007: 100).

Turning now to the main issue at stake, in an attempt to be more specific and retain focus on the didactic aspect of the matter, in the paragraphs that follow we will argue that: - communication between comparative literature and translation can contribute to both language and (inter)cultural awareness in terms of register and variation (both synchronic and diachronic); - practical examples of the basis from which this dialogue could be promoted are still missing but not difficult to build up; we will offer the reader some such examples later in the chapter. What is to be hoped for is effective cooperation amongst scholars from the two areas of comparative literature and translation, possibly working in a situation of physical (and – first and foremost – interest) proximity. We believe that the benefit of a truly interdisciplinary approach to the literary text could be tremendous for both language and literature learners, in first as well as second language environments.



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We will provide the reader with a few operative examples of how the translator’s and comparative literature scholar’s tools can effectively be employed to allow for (and, above all, promote) the development of language and intercultural competence. First, we will show how the coexistence of different varieties in the same work, as increasingly characterises many texts today, can help to improve the language learner’s awareness of this aspect of communication in contemporary English. We will address this issue with reference to Zadie Smith’s masterly use of linguistic and literary creolisation, which has already provided precious materials for the language class in Chapter 2. While hands-on activities on texts originally written in English certainly promote in-depth knowledge of the different language varieties to be found therein (in addition to the ability to detect them), linguistic analysis of texts in the language learner’s mother tongue, where this is not English, can raise awareness of the existence of different varieties in any language. In the second part of the chapter we will offer evidence of this through the presentation of extracts from another text featuring an interesting recourse to a ‘realistic’ style of conversation that, like Smith’s, we have already introduced above (Chapter 2), Come Dio comanda by Niccolò Ammaniti. Our claims about the English and Italian text samples and the journey across the two could be applied to other language pairs and, in multilingual learning contexts as well as in the case of multiple translations of the same text, also usefully employed for multilinguistic contrastive comparison. Most speakers, especially the young, often use language, including their mother tongue, with poor pragmatic awareness, i.e. with scarce attention to the context of communication. It is precisely at this point that fictitious dialogues from a novel can step in. Indeed, they may actually prove to be more compelling for our purposes than real interactions, as mentioned in § 2.2.3. While referring back to one such argument, we will also show how, by applying the principles of translation criticism to literary texts in the language class, students can learn to evaluate translators’ solutions with a view to developing their communicative competence further and, above all, to considering whether characterising aspects of many contemporary texts such as, for example, the use of strong language (a response to basic adolescent and more generally human needs, as anticipated in § 2.2.3) manages to cross translation borders when the same text gets translated into different Englishes. This will help us address the question of the ‘added’ value of translation criticism, i.e. its crucial contribution to raising awareness of interlinguistic differences such as



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variety issues – from register to idiolects and dialects and so on – from yet another perspective. Translation work on ‘realistic’ texts is a particularly delicate task. The need for translation into different Englishes, along with the attempt to respond to such a need in a time- and (above, all) cost-effective way, may sometimes produce linguistic ‘adjustments’ which in turn may affect the way the other culture is perceived. We end by suggesting possible expansions on the topic, both in order to raise the readers’ awareness of the existence of a bulk of texts which could be exploited for the ends exemplified here and to encourage them to keep an eye on this when either reading for pleasure or asking their students about their favourite reads. In an age characterised by ever increasing human contacts across borders, multilingualism, multiculturalism, cultural hybridity and an intensified need for communication across boundaries, an emphasis on interdisciplinarity is crucial: getting used to looking at things, events and people from different perspectives can help develop awareness of diversity and equality issues at large. If we take translation to be a form of intercultural communication, then the practice of translation criticism which serves to monitor the crossing of borders between languages, cultures, and literatures undoubtedly serves much the same purpose; it is an even more precious spur to the enhancement of intercultural education when one considers its possible contribution to comparative literature in disclosing how images and representation of the other are constructed in translated texts.

5.2. Applying translation criticism to foreign language teaching Although comparative literature students are obviously supposed (and presumably encouraged) to develop a good knowledge of foreign languages and cultures, they are often allowed to rely on translated texts for at least part of their study. This is seen as the ‘classical’ contribution that translation can make to comparative literature. At the same time, a good number of joint programmes exist which effectively combine comparative literature and translation at some institutions, where the two areas of study are also often housed within the same department (unfortunately this is not true of all countries). From both perspectives, then, the role of translation within and/or combined with comparative literature is already fully acknowledged. However, we feel that the specific contribution that translation can make to the language learning process is not sufficiently clear, and we will here



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attempt to at least partly fill this gap by offering the reader a few ideas on how to exploit the tools of translation criticism, combined with those offered by comparativism, for the development of language competence while at the same time raising the student’s awareness of intercultural issues.

5.2.1 Possible uses of translation criticism tools to enhance language competence Case 1: White Teeth Smith possesses a timeless maturity and sensitivity that makes her an older writer. She is as capable of writing like an English nineteenth-century writer, or speaking the idiom of a first-generation Jamaican, Bengali, Italian, or Jewish immigrant, as she is of writing stylishly as a twenty-first century young, cynical Londoner. White Teeth has plenty of evidence of Zadie Smith’s affinity with the nineteenth-century novel in her ability to pastiche Dickens’s crowded London streets, and Jane Austen’s drawingroom rituals of love, courtship and marriage as well as George Eliot’s social and documentary panoramas, her magisterial and expansive exposition of characters governed by their deep sense of the values of wider society and a struggle to maintain a position of prestige and be knitted into the wider scheme of public life. Ultimately, this demonstrates less that she is like Austen, or Dickens or Eliot and more that she can write about the English class system and how it knits the personal and political in everyone, especially immigrants, who were not the primary subject of Martin Amis or those nineteenth-century authors (Lowe 2001: 175-176).

This quotation well expresses the value of Zadie Smith’s White Teeth both in linguistic and in literary terms, and we feel it is eloquent enough to account for our choice of this book to help support some of our main points not just in this paragraph but throughout the volume. It is excellent evidence of the possible uses of literature in general (and of translation criticism, the specific aim of the present chapter) to enhance and consolidate language competence. The novel displays the coexistence of different Englishes in its constitutive texture, and its defining core is a ‘realistic’ use of spoken language, as already argued above (§ 2.2.3). It is a masterly example of linguistic and literary creolisation. The other novel that we will refer to in this chapter and have also used in other sections of the volume is Niccolò Ammaniti’s Come Dio



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comanda, 2007 Premio Strega 1 winner. Like Smith’s novel, Come Dio comanda features interesting samples of ‘realistic’ spoken language. There is another reason why both Smith’s and Ammaniti’s works have been selected for wide use in this chapter: they are in a way themselves, as source texts, examples of intrasystemic translations, “carriers of the relations between different strata” of the system (D’Hulst 2007: 99); they enrich the monolingual ‘national’ production of which they are part with such micro-structural devices as plurilingualism and popular dialogue forms which relate to more than one of the communities within the linguistic/cultural system (D’Hulst 2007: 100). In particular, Zadie Smith, writer from elsewhere, brilliantly makes use of english as opposed to English: The world language called english is a continuum of ‘intersections’ in which the speaking habits in various communities have intervened to reconstruct the language. This ‘reconstruction’ occurs in two ways: on the one hand, regional english varieties may introduce words which become familiar to all English speakers, and on the other, the varieties themselves produce national and regional peculiarities which distinguish them from other forms of English (Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin 2002 [1989]: 39).

This use of english is actually the linguistic manifestation of the more profound multiple-layered texture of the novel. The contemporary world experience of mass migration is radically changing traditional ideas of place, culture and identity. The myth that places have fixed, stable identities has, for example, definitely been abandoned over the last few decades, in favour of one of “space as a sphere of possibility” (Davis 2011: 342), “the sphere in which distinct trajectories coexist; (…) the sphere (…) of co-existing heterogeneity” (Massey 2005: 9). This remapping of space results in (or, conversely, is the result of) the drawing up of new linguistic cartographies in many contemporary novels. Smith’s White Teeth is only one example, though surely one of the very best, in the way it challenges a homogenous view of British identity through the polyphonic narration of a London experienced from different perspectives in a plurality of voices and accents. The way in which Smith (and other novelists such as Self and Malkani; see Chapter 2) celebrates the “third space” (Bhabha 1994) and her problematisation of the representation of

 1

The most prestigious Italian literary award. Since 1947 it has been awarded annually for the best work of prose fiction by an Italian author. Past winners include Cesare Pavese (1950), Alberto Moravia (1952), Elsa Morante (1957), Dino Buzzati (1958), Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa (1959), Natalia Ginzburg (1963), Primo Levi (1979), Umberto Eco (1981).



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contemporary British society as a stable and clear-cut reality has been widely addressed (by, among others, Head 2003, Helyer 2006, Thompson 2005, Walters 2005). What has perhaps not been duly considered is the sometimes totally different linguistic cartographies that practices of translation trace when compared to the mappings sketched in source texts and, consequently, the extent to which they actually reveal the continuous negotiation of space and identities characterising such linguistically rich and sophisticated novels as White Teeth.2 Di Martino 2011 (78-89) had already partly addressed the question, reflecting on a few extracts from the book (Tables 22 and 23): The fat lady did a silent calculation and then picked up the bag of hair that the girl had just left. ‘This is what you're looking for. I haven’t been able to package it, you understand. But it is absolutely clean. You want?’ Irie looked dubious. ‘Don't worry about what I said. No split ends. Just silly girl trying to get more than she deserves. Some people got no understanding of simple economics... It hurts her to cut off her hair so a million pounds she expects or something crazy. Beautiful hair, she has. When I was young, oh, mine was beautiful too eh?’ The fat lady erupted into high-pitched laughter, her busy upper lip making her moustache quiver. Table 22: Z. Smith 2001 [2000], White Teeth, London: Penguin, 280-281

‘Jackie.’ ‘Irie.’ ‘Pale, sir! Freckles an’ every ting. You Mexican?’ ‘No.’ ‘Half Jamaican. Half English.’ ‘Half-caste,’ Jackie explained patiently. ‘Your mum white?’ ‘Dad.’ Jackie wrinkled her nose. ‘Usually de udder way roun’. How curly is it? Lemme se what’s under dere-’ She made a grab for Irie’s headscarf.

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In Di Martino 2014 we propose to do this by examining some extracts of the Italian translation of White Teeth through the methodological framework of literary sociolinguistics (Mair 1992). This will show how the tension that makes up the essence of Smith’s text – a tension which is the fruit of the coexistence of multiple spatial, linguistic and cultural coordinates within the individuals peopling the narration – is handled by the translator and whether the negotiation of space and identity which constitutes the novel’s backbone does actually cross the linguistic and cultural borders.



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Irie, horrified at the possibility of being laid bare in a room full of people, got there before her and held on tight. Jackie sucked her teeth. ‘What d’you ’spec us to do wid it if we kyant see it?’ Table 23: Z. Smith 2001 [2000], White Teeth, London: Penguin, 273-274

The non-English mother tongue learners’ first reaction to the above uses of what they most probably perceive as non-standard English without any particular distinction, can be of great help to stimulate reflection on the phenomenon of linguistic non-standardness and should immediately be elicited through ad-hoc tasks: the students may, for example, be asked to underline all the expressions which they have never come across in their textbooks and guess the possible meanings in context. This class work could be followed by discussion about the possible reasons why English textbooks do not include such expressions, and about the contexts in which they do occur. Such awareness-raising activities could then be supported by follow-up tasks aimed at highlighting the differences between the two ‘non-standard’ samples as well as the distinctive features of each, in order to boost the student’s capacity to detect the specific aspects of different varieties. These activities, which should, whenever possible, be carried out in groups in order to exploit the productive and collaborative value of such interaction, could be followed by class discussion and ‘channelled’ by the teacher towards the main focus by means of purpose-built tasks. Students of English as a foreign language will certainly be challenged by Smith’s texts, but only at a higher level of competence will they actually be stimulated rather than frustrated when confronted with them in the original version alone. At lower levels, a comparison between the source text and its translation would certainly be of great help. By comparing and contrasting the second extract presented above (and reproduced again in Table 24 below) and its translation into Italian, the learner may acquire awareness of variation within the same language code while at the same time noticing the lack of equivalence across different languages, variation being a product of cultural influence and communicative needs at different levels. Even at low levels of competence we believe the learner would realize how unsuccessful the attempt to reproduce the effect of variation in the translation is.



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‘Jackie.’ ‘Irie.’ ‘Pale, sir! Freckles an’ every ting. You Mexican?’ ‘No.’ ‘Arab?’ ‘Half Jamaican. Half English.’ ‘Half-caste,’ Jackie explained patiently. ‘Your mum white?’ ‘Dad.’ Jackie wrinkled her nose. ‘Usually de udder way roun’. How curly is it? Lemme se what’s under dere-’ She made a grab for Irie’s headscarf. Irie, horrified at the possibility of being laid bare in a room full of people, got there before her and held on tight. Jackie sucked her teeth. ‘What d’you ’spec us to do wid it if we kyant see it?’

«Jackie.» «Irie.» «Palliduccia. Lentiggini e tutto. Messicana?» «No.» «Araba?» «Mezza giamaicana, mezza inglese.» «Mezzosangue» spiegò pazientemente Jackie. «È tua madre, la bianca?» «Mio padre.» Jackie arricciò il naso. «In genere è il contrario. Quanto sono ricci? Fammi vedere che cosa c’è qui sotto…» Allungò la mano verso il foulard di Irie. Irie, terrorizzata all’idea di essere messa a nudo in una stanza piena di gente, si mosse più in fretta di lei e strinse con forza il foulard. Jackie sospirò. «Che cosa ti aspetti che possiamo fare, se non ci lasci vedere?»

Table 24: Z. Smith 2001 [2000], White Teeth, London: Penguin, 273-274 (left); 2001, Denti bianchi, Milano: Mondadori, trans. by Laura Grimaldi, 283-284 (right)

Smith’s reference to the linguistic phenomenon of diatopic variation, i.e. her literary attempt to account for the linguistic identity of the Jamaican community in London as realistically as possible, clearly does not cross the English/Italian border, and we cannot but regret this, particularly because if the linguistic challenge in terms of variety spotting is marginal here (the narrative reference will easily help the reader/learner identify it), this is not always the case in White Teeth. In some cases, even the clue offered by the narrative allusion, and not just the language item itself, disappears, as in the extract below (Table 25), where the reference to the cockney accent is flattened into a generic ‘dialettale’:



Found in Translation

But the voice was a visual in itself: cockney yet refined, a voice that had had much work done upon it – missing key consonants and adding others where they were never meant to be, and all delivered through the nose with only the slightest help from the mouth. ‘Fine mornin’, Mrs B., fine mornin’. Somefing to fank the Lord for.’

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Ma la voce era visiva in sé: dialettale eppure raffinata, una voce sulla quale era stato fatto molto lavoro... togliendo alcune consonanti e aggiungendone altre dove non avrebbero dovuto esserci, il tutto pronunciato attraverso il naso, con solo un leggerissimo aiuto dalla bocca. «Bella mattinata, signora B., bella mattinata. Una cosa per cui ringraziare il Signore.»

Table 25: Z. Smith 2001 [2000], White Teeth, London: Penguin, 388 (left); 2001, Denti bianchi, Milano: Mondadori, 398 (right)

By contrast the extract in Table 26 is evidence of how the peculiarities of the variety of English featured get lost in a translation that is nonetheless effective when considering its intended audience: scarce use of function words (“Just silly girl trying to get more than she deserves. Some people got no understanding of simple economics”); use of particles (“When I was young, oh, mine was beautiful too eh?”); loose word order in form of topicalization (two cases of left dislocation in “a million pounds she expects or something crazy. Beautiful hair, she has”)3. The fat lady did a silent calculation and then picked up the bag of hair that the girl had just left. ‘This is what you're looking for. I haven’t been able to package it, you understand. But it is absolutely clean. You want?’ Irie looked dubious. ‘Don't worry about what I said. No split ends. Just silly girl trying to get more than she deserves. Some people got no understanding of simple economics... It hurts her to cut off her hair so a million

La grassona fece dei calcoli in silenzio e poi raccolse il pacco di capelli appena lasciato dalla ragazza. «Ecco che cosa tu cerchi. Non ho avuto il tempo per la confezione, tu capisci. Ma sono assolutamente puliti. Tu li vuole?» Irie era dubbiosa. «Non ti preoccupi di quello che io ho detto. Niente punte spezzate. Solo ragazza stupida che cercava di avere più di quello che merita. Certa gente nulla capisce di semplice economia… Lei ha molto

 3

In Di Martino 2011b it is argued that this is a literary sample of Immigrant English rather than Indian English.



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pounds she expects or something crazy. Beautiful hair, she has. When I was young, oh, mine was beautiful too eh?’ The fat lady erupted into high-pitched laughter, her busy upper lip making her moustache quiver.

sofferto per il suo taglio di capelli e così si aspetta un milione di sterline o qualcosa di pazzo. Belli capelli aveva. Quando ero giovane io, oh, i miei anche erano belli, eh?» La grassona emise una risata acuta, e il labbro superiore, muovendosi, le fece tremare i baffetti.

Table 26: Z. Smith 2001 [2000], White Teeth, London: Penguin, 280-281 (left); 2001, Denti bianchi, Milano: Mondadori, 291 (right)

This is not the place for an in-depth exploration of this aspect; however, it is evident that linguistic ‘adjustments’ like these affect the way the other culture is perceived. It is in such cases that the added value of proximity and of an ongoing cooperative exchange between translation criticism and comparative literature becomes unquestionable. 4 Bassnett’s invitation to the comparative scholar to “abandon pointless debate about terminology and definition, to focus more productively on the study of texts themselves” (2006: 10) is particularly relevant to this end. This is also how we envisage the literature class in a foreign language environment: we believe that the focus on texts themselves may make room for the language component; in other words, that a virtuous circle of exchanges may begin between language and literature teaching (and learning). Case 2: Come Dio comanda Work on ‘realistic’ language samples is particularly delicate, and the need for translation from languages other than English into different Englishes along with the attempt to respond to such a demand in a timely and (above all) cost-effective manner may sometimes produce adjustments similar to the ones where English is the source language; again this undeniably affects the way the ‘other’ culture is perceived. Before broaching this issue, let us focus on the literary and cultural background of the text that we have selected to support our arguments. The three main reasons why Come Dio comanda may be of interest to the Italian translation critic are:



4 For further evidence see Di Martino 2010, 2011 a and b, 2012, 2014 and forthcoming b.



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– it is one of the (very) few Italian books to have been published not just in the UK, but also in the USA; – as already stated, it is part of that Italian ‘new narrative’ trend which is currently widely acclaimed; it also represents the return to reality and the narrative complexity typical of that group of Italian works which have recently been classified under the label of ‘new Italian realism’ (Spinazzola 2010a) and included in Asor Rosa’s European history of Italian literature (2009); – it features an interesting use of spoken language. Come Dio comanda has been published not only in the UK (The Crossroads), but also, in a slightly different version, in the USA (As God Commands), and this makes it a true literary phenomenon: it is a wellknown fact that very few non-American authors ever get published in the USA, and those who do manage to break into the US market are more often than not from other English speaking countries. In addition to arousing unexpected interest in English speaking cultures, the book is also the object of scholarly interest in Italy, as mentioned above, both as a product of Italian ‘new narrative’ and as a representative sample of ‘new Italian realism’: (…) si pensi anche a un romanzo importante quale Come Dio comanda di Niccolò Ammaniti, dove un quartetto di bizzarri personaggi da opera dei pupi trucibalda ha un’autenticità delirante da manicomio criminale. In entrambi i casi la messa a fuoco rappresentativa inquadra i ceti bassi, bassissimi, come quelli in cui tutti i rapporti interpersonali rivelano la mancanza di un consenso di base per le istituzioni della legalità civile. Ciò non può non ricordare l’interesse appassionato dei neorealisti di una volta per le condizioni di vita materiale e mentale delle classi subalterne (…) (Spinazzola 2010b: 13).

Spinazzola identifies the neorealism of Come Dio comanda in its focus on the lower classes. He also attempts to explain the reasons behind contemporary Italy’s need for a new form of realism, one possible explanation being the compelling desire to throw light on the ‘real’ Italy: Grande ricchezza dunque delle forme di ripresa d’una letteratura di realtà intesa specialmente a misurare senza schermi la difficoltà di destreggiarsi tra le umiliazioni del conformismo e gli spaesamenti dell’anticonformismo: dove le vicissitudini dell’io ostentano un carattere nient’affatto epico anzi intrinsecamente antiepico. Gli è che l’inaridimento della grande speranza di un cambiamento radicale di qualità della vita consociata ha indotto la gente di lettere a fare i conti con lo stato delle cose, prendendole per quello che sono: che è pure un



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The recourse to ‘realistic’ language is actually nothing more than the surface manifestation of the pressing need to disclose the ‘real’ face of Italy and express a serious preoccupation for the loss of its future. As Spinazzola persuasively argues, this neoitaliano intensifies the emotions conveyed in the texts, the feelings of pity and compassion they evoke, and the recourse to taboo language serves much the same purpose: (…) le istanze della realisticità presiedono all’abbassamento tonale delle inflessioni di linguaggio. Lo scrittore o scrivente d’oggi non può non tenere conto dei moduli disinvolti e conversevoli dell’italiano audiovisivo: ma l’impegno di appropriatezza terminologica e facilità sintattica non mortifica anzi rilancia la coloritura espressiva a tinte ferme della pagina. Lungi dalla freddezza asettica spesso deprecata, il neoitaliano sollecita le emozioni di lettura intensificando la carica di pathos. Il ricorso diffuso al turpiloquio dell’uso corrente è il sintomo più appariscente del decadimento delle norme di sostenutezza pudica e decorosa proprie dell’italiano illustre. E mentre dilagano gli stranierismi, cioè soprattutto gli anglismi, c’è una reviviscenza del dialettismo (Spinazzola 2010b: 14).

Let us also reflect on this type of language by recalling the sample presented in Table 18 in § 2.2.3 and reproduced, side by side with its English translation, in Table 27 below, where the lexical choices account for a ‘realistic’ use of italiano dell’uso medio (or neostandard or tendenziale; Bonomi 1996, 1997). While such expressions as Figure di merda, Mi rompono i coglioni, Beccata can be classified as colloquial, other expressions (In para, Il Merda, Porta sfiga, Stava rollando un’altra canna, Sono troppo cotta, Questa ce la facciamo seria, Sei fuori, Non me li inculerei di striscio, Facciamoci il cannino della buonanotte) are definitely jargon, the last three listed (Sei fuori, Non me li inculerei di striscio, Facciamoci il cannino della buonanotte) being more innovative and therefore more identificative of youth parlance.5 As Berisso (2000) suggests, young people’s language stands out as a variety spoken by young individuals from the upper classes. While the conversation of Esmeralda (the richer and more upwardly mobile of the two female protagonists) could easily be identified as youth language, that of Fabiana (the other female protagonist, who seems to belong to the

 5



See Di Martino forthcoming a for a more detailed linguistic analysis of the book.

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world of the nouveaux-riches) is less ‘sophisticated’ and she often resorts to pornolalia (coglioni). A comparative observation of the same extract across Italian/English, accompanied by an investigation of the diverging British English/American English features (in bold) in the latter text, can make a useful exercise (Table 27). «Scommetto che sei entrata in para per il piercing!» disse Esmeralda. Ma come faceva quella là a capire sempre a cosa stava pensando? Le leggeva nel pensiero? Fabiana guardò l’amica che stava rollando un’altra canna. Cercò di apparire tranquilla. «No, stavo pensando a tutt’altro.» Ma era come se in fronte avesse scritto a caratteri cubitali: BECCATA! «E a cosa pensavi?» «A niente.» «Pensavi a quando il dentista andrà da tua madre… “Signora, sua figlia si è fatta il piercing sulla lingua”…» Ma quanto ci godi che i miei mi rompono i coglioni? «Guarda che i medici sono costretti per professione a non rivelare niente.» Esmeralda sollevò il naso dalla cartina e fece un’espressione esterrefatta. «Ma sei fuori? Il dentista?» « È così. Fanno un giuramento… Lo so…» «Sì, il giuramento di Senofonte. Come no… Stai a sentire me…



“I bet you’re freaking out about that piercing!” said Esmeralda. How did that girl always know what she was thinking? Could she read her mind? Fabiana looked at her friend, who was rolling another joint. She tried to appear calm. “No, I was thinking about something completely different.” But it was as if she has GOTCHA! written across her forehead in great big letters. “ What were you thinking about then?” “Nothing.” “You were thinking about when the dentist goes to see your mother…” Mrs. Ponticelli, your daughter’s got a piercing in her tongue”… How you love it when my parents give me a hard time! “Oh come on, doctors have a professional obligation to respect their patients’ privacy.” Esmeralda raised her eyes from the cigarette paper and goggled at her. “Are you crazy? The dentist?” “It’s true. They take an oath… I know they do…” “Oh sure, the Xenophontic oath. Yeah, sure… Listen, take my

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Non ci andare. Rimani qua. Io, se fossi in te, non me li inculerei di striscio al Merda e a tua madre… Ti comandano a bacchetta, ti considerano una cretina. Fatti valere, per una volta in vita tua.» (…) Esmeralda porse la canna a Fabiana. «Almeno facciamoci il cannino della buonanotte.» «No, sono troppo cotta. Non mi reggo in piedi. Vado.» «E dài, Fabi, lo sai che porta sfiga farsi le canne da soli» fece Esmeralda con la vocina da bambina triste. «Devo andare…» Le afferrò la mano. «Sei arrabbiata, vero, perché ti ho detto del dentista?» «No, è che devo andare.» Esmeralda abbassò gli occhi neri e poi li rialzò. «Scusami, Fabi…» «Di che?» «Lo sai… Non succederà niente, vedrai. Al massimo tua madre ti fa una scenata dal dentista… Tranquilla.» Fabiana si accorse che la rabbia si era volatilizzata. Bastava che Esmeralda la guardasse in quel modo e lei si scioglieva come una cretina. «Vabè, però poi scappo.» «Ti amo!» Esmeralda scattò in piedi e le stampò un bacio sulla



advice… Don’t go to the dentist’s. Stay here. If I were you I wouldn’t give a damn about the Turd and your mother… They boss you about, they treat you like an imbecile. Stand on your own two feet for once in your life.” (…) Esmeralda held out the joint to Fabiana. “At least let’s have a goodnight puff.” “No, I’m too spaced out. I can hardly stand up. I’m going.” “Oh come on, Fabi, you know it’s bad luck to smoke a joint on your own,” said Esmeralda in the voice of a sad little child. “I’ve got to go…” She seized her hand. “You’re mad at (cross with in the BrEng version) me, aren’t you, because of what I said about the dentist?” “No, it’s just that I’ve got to go.” Esmeralda lowered her black eyes and then raised them again. “I’m sorry, Fabi.” “What for?” “You know… It’ll be all right, you’ll see. The worst that can happen is that your mother will make a scene at the dentist’s… Don’t worry.” Fabiana realized that her anger had evaporated. Esmeralda only had to look at her like that and she’d melt like a little idiot. “Okay, but then I really must go.” “I love you!” Esmeralda jumped to her feet, planted a kiss on her lips

Found in Translation

bocca e l’abbracciò forte e poi disse: «Però questa ce la facciamo seria. Passami la bottiglia di Uliveto e una penna».

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and hugged her tight and then said: “But we’ve got to make this a good one. Pass me the bottle of Uliveto and a pen.”

Table 27: N. Ammaniti 2006, Come Dio comanda, Milano: Mondadori, 196-198 (left); 2009, As God Commands, New York: Black Cat, trans. by Jonathan Hunt, 164-166 (right); BrEng version: 2009, The Crossroads, Edinburgh: Canongate, trans. by Jonathan Hunt, 164-166

Many different types of activities can be created around texts across languages. For example, students could be asked to compare the nonstandard parts across versions in order to ascertain whether non-standard expressions in the source text correspond to non-standard expressions in the target text(s) and, in the parts where they do not, they could grade them as stronger or softer. The students could also be asked to put into words how they picture the characters in the translated text(s) and say whether or not they appear to be the same age and social class as in the original text, clearly identifying what makes them say so: different groups could work on the same task, later sharing results and discussing different choices. At the right levels of language competence, an intralinguistic translation (implying the production of both a more standard and a less standard version of the target text) could later be assigned as homework 6 and commented upon.7 The American and British versions could be handed out to the students without being identified as belonging to that specific variety, thus providing further variety-spotting practice. As for the text in question, in both translations Esmeralda and Fabiana come across as belonging to the wealthy middle class but, on the whole, there seems to be a lack of fit between Esmeralda’s conversational language in the source text and the language the same character is made to use in the target texts. This undoubtedly happens because, despite featuring a number of elements typical of the jargon used by Italian youngsters, Esmeralda’s is not (except in ‘Non me li inculerei di striscio’) proper youth jargon. Moreover, it would have been impractical (i.e. too expensive and too lengthy a process) to have had two distinct British and American versions (as can be inferred from Table 27, there are only a few differences between the two target texts), and this would have become

 6

With access to the appropriate reference materials. For example, the following dictionaries: Green 2006; Partridge, and Dalzell 2005; Ayto 2003. 7 For a full report on our personal experience with such class activities, cfr Di Martino and Di Sabato forthcoming.



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necessary if the slangy features had been kept, for two reasons: it is above all at the level of informal conversation that British and American English differ most; slang has a different ideological grounding in different countries. 8 It tends, for example, to “foreground social class groups in Britain and ethnic groups in the United States” (Milroy 2001, 56). Opting for ‘slangy’ language would most probably have added different (further) layers of meaning to the American target text, whereas Esmeralda’s ‘cleaner’ language sounds appropriate, in both varieties of English, in terms of social class ‘affiliation’. Were we to consider the even more tempting possibility of the publisher aiming to reach a broader world-wide market, this character’s language would also sound appropriate in McEnglish, i.e.: (…) the free-floating lingua franca (‘International English’) that has largely lost track of its original cultural identity, its idioms, its hidden connotations, its grammatical subtleties, and has become a reduced standardised form of language for supra-cultural communication – the ‘McLanguage’ of our globalised ‘McWorld’ or the ‘Eurospeak’ of our multilingual continent (Snell-Hornby 1999:109).

The translator has, in any case, managed to obtain an effective ‘adjustment’ in the target text but, like any adjustment, this clearly affects perception of the source culture. Bakhtin, through his enthralling idea of ‘outsideness’, can help us yet again to understand why it is still useful to approach the text via translation: There exists a very strong, but one-sided and thus untrustworthy, idea that in order to understand a foreign culture, one must enter into it, forgetting one’s own, and view the culture through the eyes of this foreign culture. This idea, as I said, is one-sided. Of course, a certain entry as a living being into a foreign culture, the possibility of seeing the world through its eyes, is a necessary part of the process of understanding it; but if this were the only aspect of this understanding, it would merely be a duplication and would not entail anything new or enriching. Creative understanding does not renounce itself, its own place in time, its own culture; and it forgets nothing. In order to understand, it is immensely important for the person who understands to be located outside the object of his or her creative understanding – in time, in space, in culture. For one cannot really see one’s own exterior and comprehend it as a whole, and no mirrors or photographs can help; our real exterior can be seen and understood only



8 Other possible reasons for the ‘cleansing’ of Esmeralda’s language are suggested in Di Martino forthcoming a.



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by other people, because they are located outside us in space and because they are others. In the realm of culture, outsideness is a most powerful factor in understanding. It is only in the eyes of another culture that foreign culture reveals itself fully and profoundly (but not maximally fully, because there will be cultures that see and understand even more). A meaning only reveals its depths once it has encountered and come into contact with another, foreign meaning: they engage in a kind of dialogue which surmounts the closedness and one-sidedness of these particular meanings, these cultures. We raise new questions for a foreign culture, ones that it did not raise for itself; we seek answers to our own questions in it; and the foreign culture responds to us by revealing to us its new aspects and new semantic depths (Bakhtin 1986: 7).

In § 5.1.1 above, we promised that we would put forward some ideas about possible expansions on the topic in order to raise the reader’s awareness of the existence of a bulk of translated texts which could fruitfully be exploited to enhance language competence. Referring back to the small corpus of English and Italian texts presented in Chapter 2, we will here briefly comment on a possible follow-up to the activities on Ammaniti’s text. These examples would, in any case, prove workable whatever the language chosen. If one looks closely at the language used by the male protagonists of Come Dio comanda, all belonging to a lower social group when compared to the two female protagonists whose conversation we have analysed above, the English translation (in both varieties) appears to be close to the original insofar as swearwords and strong language are remarkably frequent. This brings to mind a further possible reason for the levelling of youth parlance: the conscious decision to make the distance between the two social groups described even greater and, consequently, the danger and violence implied even more daunting, which in turn contributes to making the overall effect even more pulp. This reflection could easily be exploited didactically and it could be aimed specifically at language development. So too could an investigation of the linguistic features of pulp as a specific genre across languages, as well as a contrastive analysis between the English versions of Come Dio comanda and those of Ti prendo e ti porto via and Io non ho paura. There is a vast selection of pulp (and other ‘trendy’) books in English, most of them translated into a variety of different languages; among them, the teacher is certain to find something suitable for her/his specific students. We firmly believe that teachers should be encouraged at all times to keep an eye on the possible didactic uses of texts when either reading for



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pleasure or quizzing their students about their favourite reads: what to some may appear unacceptable in its paradoxical proposition of letting work eat into leisure time is in fact, we believe, far from a contradiction in terms. The already devoted teacher will find such behaviour natural, and it will in fact serve as a time-saving device, significantly reducing the hours spent on lesson planning and preparation. 



CHAPTER SIX NEARING A CONCLUSION AND A CODA: ASSESSING LITERATURE THROUGH LANGUAGE, LANGUAGE THROUGH LITERATURE It is unthinkable that the literary artist should cut himself adrift from the all-embracing role that language has in our everyday lives. So literary expression is an enhancement, or a creative liberation of the resources of language which we use from day to day. – Geoffrey Leech and Mick Short, Style in Fiction. A Linguistic Introduction to English Fictional Prose, 2007 [1981]

6.1 Pulling the threads together In this volume we have committed ourselves to reversing the standard procedure that begins with a methodological introduction and then goes on to discuss the different issues of the specific topic at hand. We have opted to start in medias res, in an attempt to enable the reader to try out the approach before it is actually described, systematised and formalised. Our choice was prompted by the consideration that general introductions are often either the object of a mere browse by the pragmatically-oriented reader (who then sometimes goes back to them after completing the reading, if the book has proved worthwhile) or delved into in such depth by the meticulous reader that s/he runs the risk of ‘ingesting’ the author’s views in an indiscriminate manner. The time has now come to fill in one such gap, and the reader will appreciate the fact that we have resolved to do so in the most economic way, by merely offering the background structure to the approach, in the form of scaffolding, in order to remain faithful to the principle, more than once professed, that education (both student and teacher education) should strive to be as learner-centred as possible. We established at the outset that what we think truly contributes to an approach aimed at the development of language through literature (to any approach, in actual fact), is its principled nature: it is not just a question of

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choosing different text-types (including noncanonical ones), on account of their being closer to our students’ likings, interests and responsivity; it is first and foremost a matter of approaching those texts from a different, genuinely linguistic, perspective. The perspective we have developed and put forward throughout this volume, consisting in the study of linguistics and literature from the standpoint of pedagogical methodology, may easily be seen as falling within the scope of pedagogical stylistics, the discipline that brings together the teaching of written texts and a foreign language with a view to boosting (among other things) language acquisition. Due to its stemming from both linguistics and literary criticism, stylistics can indeed be viewed as precisely that branch of language study which is concerned with the integration of language and literature, a bridge discipline indeed. Moreover, because it “allows different readers to come to an interpretative ‘consensus’ about a text”, its methodology can be said to be “systematic and principled” (Simpson 1997: 5) while at the same time representing “an empowering tool, because it helps explain the multiple and varied responses to linguistic patterning which different readers experience when reading texts” (Simpson 1997: 5). Finally, stylistics is characterized by a comparative nature since it matches literary discourse against all other discourses while operating “at the heart of everyday language” (Simpson 1997: 180). However, a stylistics which is not focused on itself but aimed at language development in a real class as we envisage it here, cannot be divorced from a theory of education. It must necessarily focus not only on what should be taught but also on how to teach that ‘what’ and on the specific traits of the individuals it sets out to shape: their interests, their needs, their likings.1 In Carter’s words, it should be “student-centred, activitybased and process-oriented” (Carter 1996: 3). This is where the pedagogical side of stylistics comes in: the perspective we have adopted is one of pedagogical stylistics because we regard stylistics as part of a teaching model which aims to encourage both the student’s awareness of language (how it works, in what ways it shapes reality and helps to fulfil – or hinders the fulfilment of – communicative needs) and a wider consideration and understanding of the interaction between readers and texts and of the role of feelings in such a process.2Literary education has long been resistant to both systematisation and change; pedagogical stylistics may be

 1

Also see Zyngier and Fialho’s encouragement “to integrate stylistic analysis and readers’ emotional responses”, 2010: 15. 2 For the latter aspect see Zyngier and Fialho 2010.

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looked at as the way to make texts meaningful to students and encourage the latter to become active participants in the learning process. It is against this ‘practical’ background that our second constituent decision, to avoid complex theoretical intricacies as much as possible, should be read and understood. Our intention in this volume was not to undertake a detailed treatment of the issue in question but to provide a reasonably brief sketch in order to produce, if not a manual, at least a clear and concise introduction to hands-on practice in class. Again, for the sake of clarity and economy, each chapter in the book has been basically self-contained, the central ones introducing and developing one specific genre at a time, then dealing with the related pedagogical issues, and often suggesting possible class activities. Chapter 1 has concentrated on the language/literature relation in educational contexts, arguing for a view of the literary text as a language learning opportunity; Chapter 2 has been primarily concerned with literary fiction as a speech event and on its contribution to language development, while at the same time discussing the crucial issue of choice (the substance of the themes dealt with has required a few more pages than was the case in other chapters); Chapter 3 has attempted to provide evidence of the value of poetry as an entry into language study at all levels; Chapter 4 has been broadly concerned with educational drama; finally, Chapter 5 has looked at translation criticism as another tool for the type of applied language study that this book aims to foster through the medium of literature, as well as a way to raise awareness about the issue of cultural and intercultural identity.

6.2. A Coda 6.2.1 A finale or a structuring element? or On how assessment shapes learning The term coda is used in music to refer to the section that brings a piece (or a movement) to an end; it may however be quite complex and take on the features of a self-standing section. This happens because the recapitulation often ends with a passage that sounds like a proper termination and therefore causes any music which follows to be perceived as extra material: a coda, in fact. In works featuring variations, in particular, the coda occurs at the end of the last variation and stands out for its detachment from the unifying theme. Beethoven famously expanded these sections, the coda of the Symphony No. 8 in F Major, Op. 93 being a brilliant example of this technique, due to its unusual length and particularly elaborate nature, with a

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wholly unanticipated loud CӤ that later turns out to be the root of the dominant chord of the remote key of FӤ minor, in which the main theme is forcefully restated. Far from intending to equate this section of ours with such outstanding artistic masterpieces as Beethoven’s 8th symphony, we still feel the comparison may help to justify the presence of the following extended ‘passage’ on assessment which, though it may initially appear incongruous, will soon reveal its true nature as the actual structural root of the dominant theme. Literature on teaching (not just language teaching) still frequently tends to look on assessment as a bit of a Cinderella: it comes last on the priority list when educational development is considered, despite the fact that the literature is full of references to the crucial role of appropriate assessment in shaping the learning environment. In this book we would like to attempt a reversal of this generalised attitude towards the assessment of literature: despite making it the last topic in our volume, we have devoted a special section of the conclusion to its treatment. We hope that its strategic position will make it altogether more memorable, in much the same way as the music of the coda lingers on in the listeners’ minds precisely because it comes last. Let us start by reflecting on a didactic certainty: when a given knowledge or skill is made the object of specific assessment, this is ipso facto perceived as important by the individuals involved in the learning process. Hence, if we want our students to value literature, we will have to test it as a separate topic in the curriculum.

6.2.2 Assessing literature through language, language through literature Although literature is not a focus of this volume, it is a legitimate question to wonder what happens to it in the language class, and this is particularly relevant in terms of assessment, when filtering the literature component out of the language one is crucial to weigh subject knowledge and language competence in isolation. Much literature deals with the disjunction between the teaching process and the test-types used to assess it in the language context, but very little has been written on the assessment of literature to date (Brumfit 1991; Carter and Long 1990; Di Martino 2002, 2003, 2004; Heiland and Rosenthal 2011; Spiro 1991). The mismatch between teaching practice and assessment procedures is particularly strong in the field of literature learning, since low face validity has a stronger impact on subjects in which the ideological/political com-

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ponent is particularly relevant. As a result, the application of traditional assessment procedures to innovative teaching practices causes a loss of face validity which is dangerously detrimental to the literary development of students. There can only be extreme answers to this loss. Since contemporary reception and deconstruction approaches to literature are antithetical to any traditional view of assessment and to testing in all its shapes and forms, banning methodological perspectives that threaten the acceptability of institutional discourse from schools (and universities) or abolishing testing altogether could represent an extreme though viable solution. Another feasible solution could be the inclusion of alternative forms of assessment, comprising self- and peer-assessed open-ended tasks, opening up the range of evaluative instruments alongside formal assessment tools. But let us reach this point gradually, making all the preliminary steps explicit to the reader via cogent argumentation, as this will also be beneficial in terms of sketching that principled approach (one that is theoryinformed and practice-focused, based on and acting in accordance with a precise set of rules) that we have identified as truly crucial when aiming to teach language through literature (or indeed any other subject). Assessment of literature is a doubly problematic issue, combining the thorny and still unsolved questions of assessment tout court which were hinted at above with the added complication that literature is one of those subject areas in which success cannot easily be defined. The main problems, which stem from the latter point (i.e. successful outcome not being easily defined), could be summed up as follows: – – –

There is no clear connection between students learning literature and their ‘later career’; There is no clear perception of ‘the boundaries of the subject’; There is no notion of the ‘ideal’ model of target competence or performance that indicates literary success.

A further problematic issue to address when assessing literature is How can a literature test be made world-relatedly valid?, where validity is meant not as an antonym of arbitrariness, a characteristic that is true of any form of testing, but as an antonym of artificiality. In real life people do not read or talk about literature because they are forced to do so. Even prior to reflecting upon this (actually, in order to do so, since what follows here is strictly connected), it is essential to clarify what justifies the need for literature in the specific field we are focusing on, i.e. our students’ curriculum. In order to build up a tool which effectively

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measures literary skills we have to be able to define what literary skills are and what is beneficial about them in our students’ (present and future) lives. This may appear rather extraneous to the perspective this book has chosen to adopt, but its pertinence lies in the fact that if we actually want the language-boosting component to stand out in the (teaching and assessment) process, the purely literary component needs to be delineated first. Let us start with the world-related value of literature (a colossal issue, as we are well aware). It can be paraphrased in less technical language: ‘What is beneficial about literature?’, ‘Why should a 12-, 15-, 18-, 21year-old student want (recall our point on the crucial role of choice in § 2.2.1.) to read/study literature?’ Carter and Long (1991), quoting Ur, identify two reasons for people to talk about literature: – –

to clarify ambiguity in a text; to correct an author’s distorted view of life.

These reasons strike us as artificial and unconvincing because they do not account for the actual recurrence of literary discourse in real life. A quick look at the internet page that the Department of English of a Minnesota college has devoted to the collection of graduate students’ thoughts about the benefits of literature, ‘Why Our Students Study Literature’3, can be very instructive in this respect. Here is a selection of these students’ reflections: Literature is a way in which we can capture and interpret what has happened and is happening to us personally and to the world as a whole. An entire culture exists in the written word, documenting the collective thoughts of everyone who cared to share them with the world. Therefore, I believe that for one to truly be a part of human society, it is critical that one take part in the evolution and self-realization that is literature, even if only in the reading aspect. Writing, however, carries a grave importance, as literature simply would not exist in the accessible form it does without the written word, and for that reason I believe all who can write should. One should take advantage of the great opportunity to be part of and contribute to the world and society in which he or she lives through writing. I see literature in the societal sense a collective struggle to understand and make the best of the lives that we have all been given. Literature serves as a way to enrich our minds, and presents a way to improve the world not

 3

https://gustavus.edu/english/whystudyliterature.php

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only through the beauty of its presence but through the ideas and tangible possibilities it possesses. (…) literature and art provide insights that cold hard facts do not. Most of all I find that literature makes the differences more manageable, and highlights the similarities between people. (…) the written word can be used to enlighten, to persuade, to express emotion, or simply for enjoyment. In these forms the written word becomes an art form, and a way of reaching out to others through a personal experience between the writer and the reader. Literature sets me free from the responsibilities of this world, and at the same time it ties me down to those same responsibilities. Some literature I read for an escape; to journey to a far-away land and go on a grand adventure with creatures beyond my imagination. Other literature has much more serious subject matter, and I read it to remind myself that life isn’t all cupcakes and ice cream. (…) Admittedly, part of my fascination is for ‘great ammunition for cocktail parties.’ There is a very attractive element to being able to talk about literature – great characters, famous stories – that I think attracts most people to literature. And it is a good feeling to know a lot about it. (…) I have met very intelligent people who do not read. But all of the interesting people I know read, whether or not they are particularly intelligent.

What appears is that not only do people talk (and write) about literature in everyday life, but they do so for very different reasons, which range from the humane need to “truly be a part of human society” to the pragmatic consideration that it represents “great ammunition for cocktail parties”, via the romantic reflection of it as “a collective struggle to understand and make the best of the lives that we have all been given”, and on to its functional aspect as a means “of reaching out to others”, as well as its capacity to keep together the human being’s apparently contradictory desire to be set free “from the responsibilities of this world”, yet at the same time to be tied down “to those same responsibilities”. What implicitly comes out of these reflections is also a rough idea of what literary skills are, since being an intrinsic part of the literary discourse community seems to imply being able to discuss, debate, reflect and journalise about literature, i.e. skills that could easily be included in an assessment framework, as part of its ‘alternative’, performance- and portfolio-based components. Needless to say, these very skills are crucial when looked at from the perspective of the student’s language development. To date, the most commonly used assessment formats for literature (indeed, for content learning in general) both in the first and in the foreign language seem to be standardised tests (mostly in the USA) and essays

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(mostly in Europe). Besides not being authentic, as they do not reflect activities students typically perform in classrooms, standardised tests fail to assess high order skills, which students need for future success. On the other hand, essays are not authentic, either, and rarely do they reflect the methodology used when teaching. Neither test-type is efficient in closely monitoring student progress since, by their very nature, they can only be administered a few times throughout the year. Neither can provide a sufficient overview of the student profile. They do serve a purpose in the evaluation of literary skills,Ͷ but would prove to be more beneficial to student development if used within a more comprehensive framework, i.e. when employed in combination with alternative types of assessment. We have attempted to sketch one such framework (Table 28) in previous works (Di Martino 2003): Assessment Type Performance

Portfolio

Type Specification (Tasks) Debate Discussion Fishbowl Group Project Presentation Retelling Trial Journal Learning Log Response Log Reflection Log Notetaking Notemaking Rewriting

Assessable Skills

Weight

Thinking Skills + Speaking Skills + Listening Skills + Presentation Skills + Knowledge Thinking Skills + Reading Skills + Writing Skills + Listening Skills + Learning Skills + Personal Growth

40%

25%

 4

In addition to safeguarding the favourite modalities of visual students (who tend to retain best what they absorb from written sources and perform best in written form, accordingly) and the reliability of tests, such forms of assessment (both tests and essays) tend to be more reassuring for those who are used to more traditional practices (teachers included), as they represent the primary format of content assessment at university level in some countries, where gauging knowledge of the facts pertaining to the history of literature and history of criticism, mostly in the students’ native language, is still considered to be crucial.

Nearing a Conclusion and a Coda Tests +

True-False Matching Completion Multiple Choice

Knowledge

121 35%

Reading Skills + Writing Skills + Thinking Skills

Essays



Table 28: E. Di Martino 2003, “Assessing Literature/Content Learning in a Foreign Language. A framework”, Rassegna Italiana di Linguistica Applicata RILA 35 (3), 95

Performance assessment is given the most weight in our model because it involves activities which individuals actually perform in real life both within and outside the educational context, as we have previously argued (think of debate and discussion, for example), while at the same time allowing a good coverage of abilities which are, in our opinion, most likely to ensure future success, i.e. evaluation of such high-order skills as thinking and presentation abilities (Table 29). Types of Performance Debate

Discussion



Specification Two teams of students debate a controversial issue (e.g., in the case of literature learning, after reading Pride And Prejudice, whether it is justifiable to marry for social status). The rest of the class judges which team performed best. Students meet in ‘circles’ to discuss, in the case of literature learning, poems/stories they have been asked to read. They keep a log and present final results to the other ‘circles’.



Assessable Skills Thinking Skills Speaking Skills Presentation Skills

Listening Skills Thinking Skills

Knowledge Speaking Skills Thinking Skills Collaborative Skills Presentation Skills

122 Fishbowl

Presentation

Retelling



Chapter Six A possible project in the case of literature learning could be the following: groups of students compare and contrast translations of meaningful scenes from popular texts (e.g. Romeo and Juliet) into their mother tongue. Then, they produce their own translations, which they distribute to the whole class in advance of their presentations. Groups give audio-visual presentations of their activities. Individual students choose a text (in the case of literature learning, a text of any literature genre, including lyrics of songs) relating a series of themes the class negotiates with the teacher and prepare a presentation on it. Individual students read to the class a poem/short story (in the case of literature learning) they have written out of personal inspiration or in response to/as a sequel to a rewriting of a text presented by the teacher or by other students (e.g. rewriting Lord Randal as Bob Dylan did with A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall).



Collaborative Skills

Knowledge Speaking Skills Presentation Skills

Thinking Skills Speaking Skills Presentation Skills

Thinking Skills Speaking Skills Presentation Skills

Nearing a Conclusion and a Coda Trial

Two teams of students perform a mock trial (e.g., in the case of literature learning, a trial of Doctor Faustus – ‘Is he guilty of selling his soul?’) finding evidence in the text (and, in this specific case, in their knowledge of the 16th century) to support their position. A panel of judges makes the final decision based on the evidence presented.

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Thinking Skills Speaking Skills Collaborative Skills Presentation Skills Knowledge

Listening Skills Collaborative Skills Speaking Skills

Table 29: E. Di Martino 2003, “Assessing Literature/Content Learning in a Foreign Language. A Framework”, Rassegna Italiana di Linguistica Applicata RILA 35 (3), 96

In our experience, the tasks included in our model are best assessed through the use of checklists which only contain a few elements at a time, such as for example debate and discussion checklists, where the items included (Debate: ability to stay on topic, capacity to express personal opinions and to support them convincingly; Discussion: ability to compare and contrast, capacity to develop interpretation, capacity to make judgements) could also be assessed from a language perspective by simply detailing them further. In order to filter the language component out of the cultural one and focus on it while at the same time making the assessment process altogether more reliable, the teacher could have a list of ‘compare and contrast’ keywords like the one in Table 30 at hand for each student and put a tick next to the items the student uses while being assessed, so as to be able to answer such questions as: – –

Does the student use a variety of ‘compare and contrast’ keywords? Does s/he only make use of elementary keywords or does s/he attempt to include more sophisticated terms in her/his conversation?

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An activity like this would also be beneficial in terms of student growth and self-awareness as it would allow the teacher to hand each student the above list after the test, with the indication of the keywords used (this would also raise awareness of the terms s/he could try to use more often in order to make her/his conversation more varied and sophisticated). The list should clearly be as comprehensive as possible. Student: Date: COMPARE also as as well as both equally have in common in the same way just as like most important same similar similarly the same as too

CONTRAST x ___ times x ___ times x ___ times x ___ times x ___ times x ___ times x ___ times x ___ times x ___ times x ___ times x ___ times x ___ times x ___ times x ___ times x ___ times

although and yet but contrary to differ even though however instead not the same as on the contrary on the other hand still the reverse though unless unlike whereas while

Table 30: List of ‘compare and contrast’ keywords

A similar type of activity could easily be created for the ‘personal opinion’ keyword list to be matched with the debate checklist, possibly placing formal and less formal expressions in different slots of the form, with the aim of raising students’ awareness of the degree of formality they adopt when speaking (Table 31):





Nearing a Conclusion and a Coda Student: Date: PERSONAL OPINION as far as I can tell as for me as I see it from my point of view from where I stand I believe I consider I question whether I think I’d like to point out that I’d say that I’d suggest that I do not agree that I do not believe that I would argue that I’m fairly certain that in my experience in my opinion in my view it is my belief it is quite obvious that it seems to me that let me say personally of course, many… personally, I think speaking for myself that/this is my viewpoint the way I look at it the way I see it to the best of my knowledge what I mean is Less formal options: as far as I’m concerned I feel I reckon if you ask me to be honest (with you) to my mind Table 31: List of ‘personal opinion’ keywords

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A portfolio section focusing on student progress and growth is a highly desirable component of any assessment framework in which thinking skills are presumed to carry considerable weight. We designed a possible framework in Di Martino 2003 (Table 32). Although it is difficult to ensure any degree of objectivity for this part, reliability could be raised if at least part of the activities it entails could be carried out in class and if the students could be asked, from time to time, to orally comment on them. Types of Portfolio Documents Journal

Learning Log

Reading Response Log

Reading Reflection Log

Notetaking



Specification

Assessable Skills

A weekly journal is kept by each student and periodically collected by the teacher for comment. Weekly learning and vocabulary logs are kept by each student and periodically collected by the teacher for comment. Specific skill/strategy logs are kept whenever a specific skill or strategy is focused on. A response log is filled in by each student for each text read individually or in class. Periodically, each individual student thinks back on his/her likes/dislikes in reflection logs. Each individual student is encouraged to take notes of lessons/readings in the form that is most suitable for him/her.

Personal Growth



Personal Growth + Learning Strategies

Reading Skills

Reading Skills + Thinking Skills Listening Skills + Reading Skills + Learning Strategies + Thinking Skills

Nearing a Conclusion and a Coda Notemaking

Each individual student is encouraged to organise notes in the form that is most suitable for him/her.

Rewriting

Periodically, students are asked to ‘rewrite’ texts read or heard, turning them into different types, modifying conclusions and, in the case of literature learning, introducing new characters, parodying, etc.

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Listening Skills + Reading Skills + Learning Strategies + Thinking Skills Listening Skills + Reading Skills + Writing Strategies + Thinking Skills

Table 32: E. Di Martino 2003, “Assessing Literature/Content Learning in a Foreign Language. A Framework”, Rassegna Italiana di Linguistica Applicata RILA 35 (3), 100

Performance and portfolio assessment are forms of authentic criterionreferenced assessment: they both represent real-life activities and directly reflect teaching methodology and objectives. Furthermore, they lend themselves to being assessed according to criteria which could be both negotiated with the students and made an object of self-directed learning, as well as possibly including phases of peer- and self-assessment on collaborative, presentation and thinking skills. This would favour teacher/student and student/student interaction. Performance and portfolio assessment integrate testing with teaching, thus avoiding useless exercises ‘eating into’ teaching time. Because they enable the teacher to monitor the learning process and the acquisition of high-order thinking skills, they are forms of continuous assessment that provide a good overview of student profiles. Finally, they contribute to the empowerment of both teachers and students by offering the former a better overview of the learning process and the latter greater involvement in, and therefore greater control over, their learning and assessment. As such, they represent a valid form of assessment in terms of consequential validity. Some of the tasks we have included in our framework are clearly meant to ‘measure’ psychological traits such as creativity, and this has a greater correlation with the requirements of real-world activities than with scholastic achievement per se. Of course, due to the subjective nature of such dimensions, some parts of the model are characterised by a very low

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degree of reliability, but this aspect is counterbalanced by the higher degree of real-world validity guaranteed precisely by that very correlation. Face validity could also be further raised if we opened up the possibility of negotiating such important issues as scoring guidelines and task topics, as MacNamara 2000 suggests. It is also worth stressing that the combination of alternative and traditional assessment methods assumes a degree of awareness of the diversity of school/university population in terms of personal characteristics, learning styles, intelligence and sensory modalities; and that one such model clearly encourages the student to experience the text affectively rather than to experiment and play with it intellectually (Watts 1991). Poetry is mostly disregarded in terms of assessment. Could this be linked to the assumption that poetry is inherently more difficult than other literary forms, we wonder? One may argue so, but evidence of such an intrinsic, constitutionally complex nature has yet to be demonstrated (as we have argued in Chapter 3), and we wonder whether poetry writing may not permit an even closer fit between school/university and reality: don’t we all have a teenage poem tucked away? We all know of experiments in teaching students to write poems, above all using the haiku as a model form, even at elementary levels. Yet we have not come across many attempts to assess literature through poetry, and we cannot but find this regrettable: assessment should embrace all the different forms of literary expression, so as not to curtail the student’s opportunities for development in a specific direction. “The lack of familiarity with the poetry writing process does present a challenge to teachers at all levels” (Dymoke 2003: 148-9), particularly in terms of assessment, we can add. However, poetry writing has the added value of making “language accessible: it enable[s] pupils to write ‘with a kind of honesty and… economy’ that [is] not necessarily found in other language forms”, (opinions of a GCSE English coursework moderator and head of faculty quoted in Dymoke 2003: 149150). While keeping in mind that a “heavy interventionist approach to assessment should be avoided” (Dymoke 2003: 155), since students tend to award greater value to what teachers assess more frequently, the assessment of poetry writing should certainly not be neglected. Together with specific language criteria it could include the use of the appropriate language features of poetry, i.e. of such poetic devices and wordplay as alliteration, rhyme, onomatopoeia, repetition, and puns to create effects. This could be economically represented under the heading ‘expressiveness’, taken to mean the students’ skill at shaping and crafting language to effectively fulfil their communicative needs and their ability to convey a certain mood through manipulating figurative language and making imaginative

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use of vocabulary. The degree of appropriateness achieved could be assessed against the student’s capacity to explain in what way(s) devices and wordplay have been used to engage readers and to produce an intended impact on them. The other aspect which needs to be granted due attention, and not just in terms of literature assessment, is the active participation of teachers in (all) decisional processes. Even in contexts where policy-makers seem to be aware that changes in teaching may come about if assessment formats are modified, those same policy-makers often fail to see the need for all stakeholders, teachers in primis, to be involved in the enactment of those changes. The implementation of innovation is indeed the most delicate (and crucial) stage in any process of educational change. It requires a degree of commitment from teachers that can only be achieved through a full understanding of the rationale behind any proposed change, which in turn implies common vision and shared decision-making. In literature assessment as in any other aspect of teaching and testing, teachers count.

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Chapter Four Abrams, M.H. 1999 [1957], A Glossary of Literary Terms, Fort Worth: Harcourt and Brace Anderson, M., J. Hughes and J. Manuel (eds.) 2008, Drama in English Teaching: Imagination, Action and Engagement, Melbourne VIC: Oxford University Press Bailin, S. 1998, “Critical Thinking and Drama Education”, Research in Drama Education, 3 (2), 145-155 Bowell, P. and B. Heap 2001, Planning Process Drama, London: David Fulton Bournot-Trites, M., G. Belliveau, V. Spiliotopoulos and J. Séror 2007, “The Role of Drama on Cultural Sensitivity, Motivation and Literacy in a Second Language Context”, Journal of Learning through the Arts: A Research Journal on Arts Integration in School and Communities 3 (1), Article 9, http://repositories.cdlib.org/clta/lta/vol3/iss1/art9 Bräuer, G. (ed.) 2002, Body and Language: Intercultural Learning Through Drama, Westport: Ablex Publishing Bruner, J. S. 1990, Acts of Meaning, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press Byram, M. (ed.) 2004, Routledge Encyclopedia of Language Teaching and Learning, London and New York: Routledge Byram, M. and M.P. Fleming 1998, Language Learning in Intercultural Perspective. Approaches Through Drama and Ethnography, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Cheng, Yi-Mei, A. and J. Winston 2011, “Shakespeare as a Second Language: Playfulness, Power and Pedagogy in the ESL Classroom”, RIDE: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance, Special Issue: Drama and Second Language Learning 16 (4), 541-556 Crookall, D. and R.L. Oxford (eds.) 1990, Simulation, Gaming, and Language Learning, New York: Newbury House Publishers 

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Damasio, A. 1994, Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain, New York: Putnam DeCoursey, M. 2012, “Dramatic Art for Second Language Education: Appropriate Process Objectives for Hong Kong Schools”, Asia-Pacific Journal for Arts Education, Special Issue: Current Issues, Trends and Practices in Drama/Theatre Education 11, 250-270 DICE Consortium 2010, “Making a World of Difference”, A DICE Resource for Practitioners on Educational Theatre and Drama, http://www.dramanetwork.eu/file/Education%20Resource%20long.pdf DICE Consortium 2008, “About DICE”, http://www.dramanetwork.eu/about_dice.html Di Pietro, R.J. 1987, Strategic Interaction: Learning Languages Through Scenarios, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Dunn, J. and M. Stinson 2011, “Not Without the Art!! The Importance of Teacher Artistry When Applying Drama as Pedagogy for Additional Language Learning”, Drama and Second Language Learning, Special Issue of RIDE: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance 16(4), 617-634 Dunn, J. and M. Stinson 2012, “Learning Through Emotions: Moving the Affective in from the Margins”, International Journal of Early Childhood, 44(2), 203-218 Encabo Fernandez, E., J.J. Varela Tembra, and A. López Valero 2008, “Drama as a Resource to Improve Oral Expression (Verbal and Nonverbal) at Elementary School: A Study through Different Disciplines and Teaching Suggestions”, Humanizing Language Teaching, 10(3), 114 FitzGibbon, E. 1993, “Language at Play: Drama and Theatre in Education as Stimuli in Language Learning”, in U. Jung (ed.), Towards Drama as a Method in the Foreign Language Classroom, Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 269-281 Fleming, M.P. 2004, “Drama”, in M. Byram (ed.), Routledge Encyclopedia of Language Learning and Teaching, London and New York: Routledge, 185-187 Fleming, M. 1994, Starting Drama Teaching, London: David Fulton — 1997, The Art of Drama Teaching, New Zealand: Macmillan Publishers Immordino-Yang, M.H. and M. Faeth 2010, “The Role of Emotion and Skilled Intuitition”, in D.A. Sousa (ed.), Learning Mind, Brain and Education: Neuroscience Implications for the Classroom, Bloomington IN: Solution Tree Press, 66-81 Jung, U. (ed.) 1993, Towards Drama as a Method in the Foreign Language Classroom, Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang

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ing: The Individual in the Communication Classroom, Boston: Heinle & Heinle Schneider, J., J. Crumpler, P. Thomas and T. Rogers (eds.) 2006, Process Drama and Multiple Literacies. Addressing Social, Cultural, and Ethical Issues, Portsmouth: Heinemann Silver, R., C. Goh and L. Alsagoff (eds.) 2009, Acquisition and Development in New English Contexts: Evidence from Singapore, London: Continuum Slade, P. 1954, Child Drama, London: University of London Press Stinson, M. 2008, “Drama, Process Drama, and TESOL”, in M. Anderson, J. Hughes and J. Manuel, Melbourne (eds.), Drama in English Teaching: Imagination, Action and Engagement, Melbourne VIC: Oxford University Press, 193-212 — 2010, “Diversity, Discretion and Distinction in Drama Learning”, DATE 1 (1), 113-129 Stinson, M. and K. Freebody 2009, “The Contribution of Process Drama to Improved Results in English Oral Communication”, in R. Silver, C. Goh and L. Alsagoff (eds.), Acquisition and Development in New English Contexts: Evidence from Singapore, London: Continuum 147-165. Stinson, M. and J. Winston 2011, “Drama Education and Second Language Learning: A Growing Field of Practice and Research” (Editorial), Drama and Second Language Learning, Special Issue of RIDE: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance 16(4), 479-488 Tarlington, C. and P. Verriour 1991, In Role: Teaching and Learning Dramatically, London: Heinemann Taylor, P. and C.D. Warner (eds.) 2006, Structure and Spontaneity. Process Drama of Cecily O’Neill, Stoke on Trent: Trentham Books Tschurtschenthaler, H. 2013, Drama-based Foreign Language Learning: Encounters between Self and Other, Munster: Waxmann Verlag Vygotsky, L.S. 1978, Mind in Society: The Development of Higher Psychological Processes. Edited and trans. by M. Cole, V. John Steiner, S. Scribner, and E. Souberman, Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press Wagner, B.J. 1998, Educational Drama and Language Arts: What Research Shows, Portsmouth NH: Heinemann — 2002, “Understanding Drama-Based Education”, in G. Bräuer (ed.), Body and Language: Intercultural Learning Through Drama, Westport CT: Ablex, 3-18 — 2004, “Educational Drama and Language Development”, in R.L. Clemets and L. Fiorentino (eds.), A Child’s Right to Play, Westport CT: Praeger, 347-358

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Wessels, C. 2003 [1987], Drama, Resource Books for Teachers, Oxford: Oxford University Press Wilburn, D. 1992, “Learning Through Drama in the Immersion Classroom”, Life in Language Immersion Classrooms, in E. Buchter Bernhardt (ed.), Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, 67-83 Winston, J. 1998, Drama, Narrative and Moral Education, London: Falmer Press — 2012, Second Language Learning through Drama: Practical Techniques and Applications, London and New York: Routledge

Chapter Five Ammaniti, N. 2006, Come Dio comanda, Milano: Mondadori — 2009a, As God Commands. Trans. by J. Hunt, New York: Black Cat — 2009b, The Crossroads. Trans. by J. Hunt, Edinburgh: Canongate Books Apter, E. 2006, The Translation Zone: A New Comparative Literature, Princeton: Princeton University Press — 2010, “The Right to Translation: Deconstructive Pedagogy in Comparative Literature, 1979/2009”, boundary 2 37 (3), 29-56 Ashcroft, B., G. Griffiths and H. Tiffin 2002 [1989], The Empire Writes Back, London and New York: Routledge Asor Rosa, A. 2009, Storia europea della letteratura italiana III, Torino: Einaudi Ayto, J. 2003, The Oxford Dictionary of Slang, Oxford: Oxford University Press Bakhtin, M.M. 1986, Speech Genres and Other Late Essays. Trans. by V.W. McGee, Austin: University of Texas Press Bassnett, S. 1993, Comparative Literature: A Critical Introduction, Oxford: Blackwell — 2006, “Reflections on Comparative Literature in the Twenty-First Century”, Comparative Critical Studies 3(1-2), 3-11 Berisso, M. 2000, “Livelli linguistici e soluzioni stilistiche. Sondaggi sulla nuova narrativa italiana 1991-1998”, Lingua e Stile 35(3), 471-504 Berman, A. 1995, Pour une critique des traductions: John Donne, Paris: Gallimard Bhabha, H. 1994, The Location of Culture, London and New York: Routledge Bonomi, I. 1996, “La narrativa e l’italiano dell’uso medio”, Studi di grammatica italiana 16, 321-338

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— 1997, “La grammatica del parlato in alcuni scrittori contemporanei”, in Norma e lingua in Italia: alcune riflessioni tra passato e presente. Incontro di studio n.10, Milano: Istituto Lombardo Accademia di Scienze e Lettere, 167-183 D’Hulst, L. 2007, “Comparative Literature versus Translation Studies: Close Encounters of the Third Kind?”, European Review 15(1), 95-104 Davis, T.M. 2011, Southscapes. Geographies of Race, Region & Literature, The University of North Carolina: The University of North Carolina Press Di Martino, E. 2010, “La sovrana lettrice e The Uncommon Reader: un approccio critico al testo tradotto”, in F. De Giovanni and B. Di Sabato (eds.), Tradurre in pratica. Riflessioni, esperienze, testimonianze, Napoli: Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane, 113-140 — 2011a, “Da The Uncommon Reader a La sovrana lettrice: voci in transito”, in O. Palusci (ed.), Traduttrici. Female Voices across Languages, Trento: Tangram Edizioni Scientifiche, 289-300 — 2011b, “Le varietà diatopica e diastratica”, in B. Di Sabato and E. Di Martino, Testi in viaggio. Incontri fra lingue e culture, attraversamenti di generi e di senso, traduzione, Torino: UTET, 78-89 — 2012, “When the Same Book Speaks two Different Languages. Identity and Social Relationships across Cultures in the Bennett/Pavani Text of The Uncommon Reader”, Anglistica AION. An Interdisciplinary Journal 16(1-2), 57-83, http://www.anglistica.unior.it/sites/anglistica/files/04%20Di%20Marti no.pdf — 2014, “Cartografie linguistiche di migranti in traduzione: White Teeth e la traduzione di Laura Grimaldi”, in B. Di Sabato and A. Perri (eds.), I confini della traduzione, Limena: Libreria Universitaria Edizioni, 183193 — forthcoming a, “Pulp Literature in Translation. The Case of Ammaniti’s Come Dio comanda” — forthcoming b, “Some Reflections on the Contribution of Translation Criticism to Comparative Literature (and Intercultural Education) Supported by the Analysis of Two Come Dio Comanda Versions in different Englishes and a Short Reference to the Italian Translation of White Teeth”, Koper, Università del Litorale/Univerza na Primorskem, Centro di ricerche scientifiche: Edizioni Annales Di Martino, E. and B. Di Sabato forthcoming, “‘Remediating’ from a Didactic Perspective: Re-Using Translated Literature to Boost Language Learning”

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Di Martino, E. and M. Pavani 2013, “Common and Uncommon Readers: Communication amongst Translators and Translation Critics at Different Moments of the Text’s life”, in H. Jansen and A. Wegener (eds.), Authorial and Editorial Voices in Translation 1 - Collaborative Relationships between Authors, Translators, and Performers, Special Issue of Vita Traductiva, Montréal: Éditions québécoises de l’oeuvre, 237265 Dodds, J. 1985, The Theory and Practice of Text Analysis and Translation Criticism, Udine: Campanotto — 1992, “Translation Criticism in Defence of the Profession”, Rivista Internazionale di Tecnica della Traduzione 00, 1-4 Green, J. 2006, Cassell’s Dictionary of Slang: A Major New Edition of the Market-Leading Dictionary of Slang, London: Cassell Head, D. 2003, “Zadie Smith’s White Teeth: Multiculturalism for the Millennium”, in R.J. Lane, R. Mengham and P. Tew (eds.), Contemporary British Fiction, Cambridge: Polity Press, 106-119 Helyer, R. 2006, “‘England as a Pure, White Palladian Mansion Set upon a Hill above a Silver Winding River’: Fiction’s Alternative Histories”, in R. Burden and S. Kohl (eds.), Landscape and Englishness, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 243-260 Lowe, J. 2001, “No More Lonely Londoners”, Small Axe 5(1), 166-180 Mair, C. 1992, “A Methodological Framework for Research on the Use of Nonstandard Language in Fiction”, Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik 17(1), 103-123 Massey, D.B. 2005, For Space, London: Sage Mattioli, E. 1996, “Per una critica della traduzione”, Studi di Estetica 14 (2), 193-198 Milroy, L. 2001, “Britain and the United States: Two Nations Divided by the Same Language (and Different Language Ideologies)”, Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 10(1), 56-89 Partridge, E. and V. Dalzell 2005, The New Partridge’s Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English, London and New York: Routledge Reiss, K. 2000, Translation Criticism: The Potentials and Limitations Categories and Criteria for Translation Quality Assessment. Trans. by E.F. Rhodes, Manchester: St. Jerome Smith, Z. 2001 [2000], White Teeth, London: Penguin — 2001, Denti bianchi. Trans. by L. Grimaldi, Mondadori: Milano Snell-Hornby, M. 1999, “Communicating in the Global Village: On Language, Translation and Cultural Identity”, Current Issues in Language & Society 6, 103-120

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Spivak, G.C. 2003, Death of a Discipline, New York: Columbia University Press Spinazzola, V. (ed.) 2010a, Tirature ’10, Milano: Il Saggiatore — 2010b, “La riscoperta dell’Italia”, in V. Spinazzola (ed.), Tirature 2010 – Il New Italian Realism, Milano: Il Saggiatore, 10-15 Thompson, M. 2005, “‘Happy Multicultural Land’? The Implications of an ‘Excess of Belonging’ in Zadie Smith’s White Teeth”, in K. Sesay (ed.), Write Black, Write British: From Post Colonial to Black British Literature, Hertford: Hansib, 122-140 Venuti, L. 1996, Lawrence Venuti, “Translation and the Pedagogy of Literature”, College English 58(3), 327-344 Walters, T.L. 2005, “‘We’re All English Now Mate Like It or Lump It’: The Black/Britishness of Zadie Smith's White Teeth”, in K. Sesay (ed.), Write Black, Write British: From Post Colonial to Black British Literature, Hertford: Hansib, 314-322

Chapter Six Brumfit, C. (ed.) 1991, Assessment in Literature Teaching, London: Macmillan Carter, R.A. 1996, “Look Both Ways before Crossing: Developments in the Language and Literature Classroom”, in R.A. Carter and J. McRae (eds.) Language, Literature and the Learner. Creative Classroom Practice, Harlow: Longman, 1-15 Carter, R.A. and M.N. Long 1990, “Testing Literature in EFL Classes: Tradition and Innovation”, ELT Journal 44(3), 215-221 Di Martino, E. 2002, “Face Validity in Literature Testing: Reality or Chimera?”, Rivista di Psicolinguistica Applicata RiPlA 2(1-2), 109118 — 2003, “Assessing Literature/Content Learning in a Foreign Language. A Framework”, Rassegna Italiana di Linguistica Applicata RILA 35 (3), 87-106 — 2004, “The Literature Test in the Nuovo Esame di Stato”, Rassegna Italiana di Linguistica Applicata RILA 36(2-3), 147-169 Dymoke, S. 2003, Drafting and Assessing Poetry: A Guide for Teachers, Thousand Oaks: Sage Gustavus Adolphus College n.d., “Why Our Students Study Literature”, https://gustavus.edu/english/whystudyliterature.php Heiland, D. and L.J. Rosenthal (eds.) (with the assistance of C. Ching) 2011, Literary Study, Measurement, and the Sublime: Disciplinary Assessment, New York: The Teagle Foundation

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INDEX A Abbas, N.F. 60 Abrams, M.H. 83 Adamson, S. 26 adolescent learner 39, 60 adolescent literacy 38, 39 adolescent talk 60, 61, 96 Albrecht, J. 57 Alexander, P.A. 31 Allan, K. 60 Allington, R.L. 38 alliteration 7, 69, 80, 128 Alsagoff, L. 3, 87 alterity 21, 22 See also otherness Ammaniti, N. 40, 42, 45, 46, 47, 56, 57, 96, 98, 99, 105, 109, 111 Anderson, E. 38 Anderson, M. 3, 86, 87 Anderson, R.C. 38 Andersson, L. 60 Andringa, E. 39 approach collaborative 87 collective 87, 89 deconstruction 117 hands-on 86 holistic 64 humanizing 64 inductive 74, 81 intercultural 89 interventionist 128 interdisciplinary 95 principled 54, 117 reception 117 transactional 4, 9 Apter, E. 94, 95 Ashcroft, B. 99 Asor Rosa, A. 105 assessment

alternative 117, 119, 120, 127 authentic 127 continuous 127 criterion-referenced 127 peer- 117, 127 performance 119, 120, 121, 127 portfolio 119, 120, 127 reliable 120, 121 self- 117, 127 assonance 69, 72 Austin, J.L. 34 authentic behaviour 11, 13 authentic discourse 10, 11, 13 authentic language IX, X, 10, 11, 13, 22, 37, 42, 51, 59, 60, 61, 119 authentic text 10, 13, 18, 51 awareness (inter)cultural 11, 12, 37, 89, 95, 97, 98, 115 language 7, 9, 37, 41, 46, 63, 65, 72, 74, 76, 96, 101, 114, 123, 124 literary 12, 18, 75, 79 B Bailin, S. 91 Bakhtin, M.M. 21, 22, 23, 26, 32, 33, 46, 34, 110, 111 Ballestra, S. 47 Barbieri, D. 63, 68 Bardovi-Harlig, K. 55 Barilli, R. 47 Barthes, R. 40 Bassnett, S. 70, 94, 104 Bean, J. 41 Bean, T.W. 38 Belliveau, G. 3, 87, 89 Berisso, M. 49, 57, 59, 106

156 Berman, A. 93 Bhabha, H. 99 Biber, D. 26, 30 Birdyshaw, D. 38 Blake, N.F. 37 Bleich, D. 16 Boardman, R. 15 Bonomi I. 106 Bournot-Trites, M. 3, 87, 89 Bowell, P. 90 Bräuer, G. 86, 89 Bredella L. 14, 16, 18 Brewster J. 15 Brizzi E. 40, 42, 47, 48, 49, 59 Brumfit C.J. 7, 116 Bruner, J.S. 88 Burridge K. 60 Buskist, C. 32, 39, 40 Byram, M. 84, 86, 89 C canon 16, 17, 40, 42, 53, 54, 114 Carroli P. 9 Carter, R.A. 7, 8, 10, 15, 17, 32, 63, 114, 116, 118 Cheng, Yi-Mei, A. 84 Cheshire J. 25 chick-lit 49, 51 Chipere N. 59 Collie J. 15 colloquialization 26 See also conversationalization, dialogicism, informalization and orality Colombo, F. 47 communicative needs 101, 114, 128 community diasporic 37, 102 discourse 11, 119 community membership 30, 52 community of learners 9, 85 competence communicative 55, 91, 96 intercultural 96

Index language 2, 5, 14, 15, 19, 55, 64, 74, 75, 77, 80, 98, 101, 109, 111, 116 literary 5, 7 meta- 90 target 117 complexity human 11, 23, 34 narrative 23, 105 present-day 23, 29 context educational 3, 19, 65, 67, 74, 83, 84, 88, 90, 115, 121 human 11, 23, 34 language learning/teaching 6, 8, 9, 10, 15, 55, 67, 76, 84, 87, 96 multilingual 71 narrative 23, 105 present-day 23, 29 context of communication 71, 80, 88, 96, 101 conversationalization 76 See also colloquialization, dialogicim, informalization and orality Cook G. 5, 6, 8, 9, 11, 13, 19, 78, 79, 80 Cordelli, F. 47 Cortelazzo M.A. 57, 58 Coupland N. 37 Covito C. 42, 47, 49 creativity 9, 16, 31, 32, 33, 34, 55, 56, 85, 86, 127 creolisation 35, 95, 96, 98 See also hybridity Crookall, D. 85, 86 Crumpler, J. 89, 90 culture foreign 10, 11, 12, 18, 52, 72, 89, 93, 97, 104, 110, 111 high 40 popular 6, 26, 40, 51 source 110, 111

Studying Language through Literature D D’Achille P. 61 D’Hulst L. 95, 99 Damasio, A. 88 Danesi, M. 52, 60, 61 debate 120, 121, 123, 124 Denti, R. 47 Derrida, J. 34, 94 Dewaele, J-M. 60 Di Martino, E. 10, 51, 57, 60, 93, 94, 100, 103, 104, 106, 109, 110, 116, 120, 121, 123, 125, 126, 127 Di Pietro, R.J. 86, 89, 90 Di Sabato, B. 2, 57, 61, 109 Di Stefano, P. 47 dialogic learning 9 dialogical ethics 21, 22 dialogicism 23-26 See also colloquialization, conversationalization, informalization and orality DICE Consortium 84, 85 Dodds, J. 93 Donley, J. 31 drama 3, 30, 83-91 Duff, A. 9, 11, 15, 16, 63, 86 Dunn, J. 3, 87, 89 E Edmondson, W. 64 educational drama 83-91 Ellis, G. 15 Encabo Fernandez, E. 90 ethics dialogical 21, 22 ethics of alterity 21 ethics of the utterance 21 exotopy 21 F Faeth, M. 88 Fairclough, N. 26 Fecteau, M. 75

157

Ferris, S. 51 fiction 21-61 fictional works IX, 6,7,11, 30 Finegan, E. 26 Fish, S. 16, 41 fishbowl 120, 122 FitzGibbon, E. 86 Fleming, M.P. 84, 85, 86, 89 Fox, S. 25 Freebody, K. 90 G Gadda, C.E. IX, X Garvie, E. 15 genre 8, 14, 16, 17, 23, 26, 30, 55, 111 Gibson, J.J. 52 Gilroy, M. 6 Goh, C. 3, 87 Green, J. 109 Green, K. 31 Griffiths, G. 99 Guglielmi, A. 47 Guthrie, J. 38 H Hall, G. 3, 18, 25, 26, 30, 52, 53, 56, 75 Halliday, M.A.K. 7 Hanauer, D.I. 3, 9, 63, 64, 72, 74, 75, 76 Hartford, B.A.S. 55 haiku 76, 77, 128 Head, D. 100 Heap, B. 90 Heiland, D. 116 Helyer, R. 100 Henderson, S.C. 32, 39, 40 Henning, S.D. 5 Hill, J. 17 Hirsch, E. 63 Hirvela, A. 16 Holliday, A. 26 Hughes, J. 3, 86, 87

158 hybridity 97 See also creolisation I identity 29, 52, 73, 99 Iida, A. 76, 77 Immordino-Yang, M.H. 88 informalization 26 See also colloquialization, conversationalization, dialogicism and orality instruction meaning-based 5 text-based 3, 5, 9, 18, 21 iterability 34 J Jakobson, R. 41, 65, 68, 69, 72, 78 jingle 78, 79, 81 Jung, U. 86 K Kao, S.M. 86, 89, 90 Keefe, J.L. 73 Kerswill, P. 25 Kinsella, S. 50 Knowles, E. 71 Koss, M.D. 38, 39, 41 Kramsch, C. 5, 6, 9, 14, 15, 17, 18, 52, 63, 64, 67, 71, 72, 76, 77 Kuiken, D. 56 L La Porta, F. 47 Ladousse, G.P. 15, 85, 86 Lambert, A. 88 Landa, A. 30 language variety 96, 97, 102, 103, 106, 109 language first 2, 64, 80, 81, 87, 88, 95, 119

Index foreign 2, 3, 8, 13, 15, 18, 19, 52, 60, 68, 70, 72, 74, 76, 85, 97, 101, 104, 114, 119 gestural 78 second 9, 64, 72, 75, 84, 85, 88, 95 strong 60, 96, 111 taboo 60, 106 youngster 47, 48, 57, 58, 106, 109, 111 Lantolf, J. 52 Lazar, G. 2, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 12, 15, 16, 17, 18, 31 learning objective 67, 79, 81 level of competence 2, 14, 15, 19, 55, 64, 74, 77, 101, 109 limerick 15, 81 linguistic adjustment 97, 104, 110 linguistics 7, 94, 114 applied 5 educational 10 English 3 literariness 26, 41, 42, 49, 80 literary criticism 63, 94, 114 literary language ix, x, 6, 8, 9, 17, 26, 31, 42 literature bad 16, 40, 41 comparative 93-112 contemporary x, 21-61 young adult 38-61 literaturnost 41 Liu, J. 90 Li-Yu Chang, S. 84 log learning 120, 126 reading 126 reflection 120, 126 response 120, 126 Long, M.N. 15, 116, 118 López Valero, A. 90n. Lowe, J. 98 Luperini, R. 51

Studying Language through Literature M MacNamara, T. 128 Mahan-Taylor, R. 55 Mair, C. 26, 37, 100 Maley, A. 3, 9, 11, 15, 16, 63, 86n. Malkani, G. 23-28, 35-37, 99 Manuel J. 3, 86, 87 Marcato, C. 52 Massey, D. 99 Mattioli, E. 93 Maybin, J. 63 McCarthy, M.J. 17, 32 McGill-Franzen, A. 38 meaning-construction activity 19 Mercer, N. 63 metaphor 7, 73 métissage 37 Miall, D. S. 56 Miller, J.H. 28, 34, 35, 72 Milroy, L. 110 Moccia, F. 59 Montale, E. 71, 72, 81 Moore, D.W. 38 Moorman, M. 38n. Morgan, J.H. 15 Morgan, M.J. 55 multivoicedness 23 musicality 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 77, 79, 80 N narrative(s) 21, 29, 30 narrativity 29, 30 Nieto, S. 89 Nolden, T. 18 non-standard 58, 59, 95, 101, 109 notemaking 120, 126 notetaking 120, 126 novel 4, 9, 12, 16, 17, 21, 22-30 nursery rhyme 64, 70, 78, 81 O O’Neill, C. 88, 89, 90 O’Keefe, A. 32

159

Onega, J. 30 onomatopoeia 72, 128 orality 26, 32 See also colloquialization, conversationalization, dialogicism and informalization Orwell, G. 40 ostranenie 41 otherness 21, 22, 29 See also alterity Oxford, R.L. 85, 86 P paraphrasing 66, 70-72 Parkinson, B. 1, 4, 5, 6, 11, 13, 14, 16, 17, 18 Pavani, M. 94 Pavlenko, A. 52 Pearce, M. 26 Piazzoli, E. 88n. Piccinini, A. 47 Plath, S. 73 Podlozny, A. 86 poem 4, 15, 63-81 poetry writing 74-77, 122, 127, 128 Porter Ladousse, G. 15 portfolio 119, 120, 125-127 Pound, E. 16, 67, 77 pronunciation 70, 80, 86 Propp, V. 30 Pross, E. 86, 88 R Radtke, E. 52 reading literary 4-18, 32, 33, 38-41, 51, 54, 64, 65-69, 72, 74, 75, 77, 86, 94, 97, 111 realism linguistic 35-38 new Italian 105, 106 Reeves, A. 38n. register 7, 11, 18, 46, 55, 57, 87, 95, 97

160 Reid, I. 54 Reid Thomas, H. 1, 4, 5, 6, 11, 13, 14, 16, 17, 18 Reiss, K. 93 repetition 7, 69, 72, 74, 79, 128 response emotional 15, 16, 29, 39, 114n. personal 5, 11, rewriting 70, 120, 122, 126 Reynolds, D.W. 55 rhyme 64, 65, 68, 69-70, 72, 74, 79, 128 rhythm 28, 42, 63, 67-69 Rinvolucri, M. 15 Robinson, P. 71, 72 Rogers, T. 89, 90 role-play 84-86 Rosenblatt, L.M. 4-5, 9, 31 Rosenthal, L.J. 116 Rothwell, J. 87, 89, 91 Rycik, J.A. 38 S Sabatini, F. 59n. Sarangi, S. 26 Scarcella, R.C. 85, 86 Schleiermacher, F. 70 Schneider, J. 89, 90 Schwartz, R. 40 Self, W. 27-29, 37, 38, 99 Séror, J. 3, 87, 89 Sfard, A. 52 Shanahan, D. 2, 5, 12, 15 Shklovsky, V. 21 Short, M. 7, 113 Silver R. 3, 87 simulation 84-85 Sinclair J. 6, 7 Sinibaldi, M. 47 skill 5, 9, 15, 16, 32, 54, 61, 72, 73, 83, 84, 86, 87, 90, 91, 118, 119, 120-123, 125-127 Slade, P. 86 slang 36, 37 slangy language 58-61

Index Slater, S. 15 Smith, Z. 23-27, 28, 29, 35, 96, 98104 Snell-Hornby, M. 110 Sobrero A.A. 48, 57, 58 social semiotics 26-28 song 15, 17, 53, 64, 78, 79, 80, 81, 122 sound 63, 65, 67, 68, 69, 70, 72, 78, 79, 110 Spiegel, D.L. 31 Spiliotopoulos, V. 3, 87, 89 Spinazzola V. 105-106 Spires, H.A. 31n. Spiro, J. 116 Spivak, G.C. 94 spoken interaction 9, 32, 46 Springen, K. 53, 54 stage 85, 86, 91 stance aesthetic 31 efferent 31 stanza 66, 69 Stinson, M. 3, 86, 87, 88, 90 stress 63, 68-69 style 7, 11, 18, 22, 26, 33, 46, 57, 127 stylistics 3, 7-8, 114 syllable 65, 68-69 syllabus 19, 61 T Tannen, D. 32 Tarlington, C. 86 Taylor, P. 90 Teale, W.H. 38, 39, 41 text types 4, 6, 8, 9, 11, 14, 18, 21n., 30, 46, 63, 65, 114, 116, textspeak 35, 38 theatre 83-85, 91 Thompson, M. 100 Tiffin, H. 99 Todorov, T. 30 Toolan, M.J. 30 Torgersen, E. 25n.

Studying Language through Literature translation X, 17, 49, 67, 70-72, 76n., 80, 93-112 translation criticism 93-102 Trudgill, P. 60 Tschurtschenthaler, H. 3, 83, 85 Turner, M. 38n. V Valesio, P. 34 Varela Tembra, J.J. 90n. variation diastratic 57 diatopic 102 Venuti, L. 70, 93 Verriour, P. 86 vocabulary 10n., 67, 76, 86n., 87, 90, 126, 128 Vygotsky, L.S. 88

161

W Wagner, B.J. 86, 87, 88, 90 Wainwrigh, J. 63, 65, 78 Walters, T.L. 100 Warner, C.D. 90 Wesling, D. 21n. Wessels, C. 86n. Widdowson, H.G. 1, 6, 10, 11, 13, 14, 18, 51n., 60 Wilburn, D. 85n., 87, 89 Winston, J. 3, 84, 86, 87, 91 Wise, J. 22n. Worthy, J. 38n. Wright, A. 15 Y Young, M. 51 Z Zapruder, M. 66