Contemporary Cognitive Stylistics for Teachers
We have secured funding to run a project working with schoolteachers to produce teaching materials based on our experience in cognitive stylistics.
During a set of three workshops we will share the various strands of work we have undertaken and which we feel could support three key curriculum areas:
- reading poetry
- teaching writing
- promoting reading using emotion-led pedagogy.
Updates to follow.
Cognitive Grammar in the Classroom
In 2018 we published a textbook for undergraduates, Cognitive Grammar in Stylistics: A Practical Guide, which was centred on (as the name suggests!) introducing ideas and concepts from Cognitive Grammar as a practical framework for text analysis. To explore the application of these ideas in the secondary English classroom, in April and July 2019 we ran two CPD workshops at Aston University in Birmingham for secondary English teachers. In the first session, we introduced some key concepts of the Cognitive Grammar framework; and for the second session we invited our participants to share their experiences of teaching these ideas in their respective classrooms. The chapters in the collection are the written accounts, lesson plans and teaching resources they used in class.
The collection includes a number of Cognitive Grammar ideas, such as specificity and schematicity, clause types and trajector-landmark relationships, to a diverse range of texts from the secondary English syllabus (from A Christmas Carol, to Frankenstein and Pride and Prejudice) across different literary genres (horror, the Gothic and dystopian fiction, among others). Each chapter includes a brief editors’ note that introduces the central Cognitive Grammar concepts, as well as a commentary on the application of these ideas in classroom and the students’ responses to the task.
appliedstylistics.com 