At a time when the Research Assessment Exercise has too often been interpreted as a showcase for learned monographs, preferably published by Oxford or Cambridge University Press, there is a greater need than ever for course textbooks, creatively conceived, imaginatively written, and pitched at the right level for a range of undergraduate abilities. Fortunately, there are still some outstanding academics who produce such materials. One is Mick Short, whose book Exploring the Language of Poems, Plays, and Prose, I have been using for a course in 'Stylistics' since its publication in 1996.
This textbook is a model of its kind. Its lucid style introduces and explains the concepts without oversimplification or condescension. Its diagrams and tables are functional rather than cosmetic. It proceeds through its ideas by analysis, example, exercise, and rehearsal (with excellent 'checksheets' at the end of each chapter), offering a structured experience which sees learning as a process. But the process is flexible. The organisation of the material allows the tutor easily to intervene, to substitute new material, new examples and exercises, without disturbing the coherence of the approach.
One advantage of using good textbooks is that the tutor shares the experience of the students much more specifically than is normally true. Whatever I feel I already 'know' I have to take myself through the discipline of reading as the students read, shadowing the level of their response. The role involves an imaginative participation as the implied (student) reader. I imagine impasse and uncertainty: "I didn't really understand how schema-orientation can be used to indicate point of view" or "what exactly is the difference between the perlocutionary force of a speech act and its illocutionary force"; or "why is a parenthetic sentence structure more complex than an anticipatory one"? (Fortunately, on most of the terminological detail, Short is immediately helpful, so one has often only to guide the student's return to the passage, or explanation, to answer such questions, should they arise.) But I am not, of course, primarily the implied reader. I am also my own reading self. This other role tends rather to complicate than to elucidate. I find myself objecting and resisting, asking, if you like, my own questions: "isn't the concept of foregrounding as something in the text rather than in the reader's response flawed"; "doesn't the concept of authorial choice return the reader to the level of Frye's 'Little Jack Horner' pulling out the plums?"; "isn't it really intentions that make people do things rather than speech acts?".
It may seem axiomatic (those of us who have completed ILT applications will certainly have held it so) that in the classroom the priority has to be given to the students' reading, learning and thinking experience, but, in practice, it's always difficult not to impose the importance of one's own questions. Of course these questions might genuinely be important to students as well, so there has to be a sense of engagement with the textbook, rather than a simple acceptance of its premises. But the good teacher, to some extent, will also have to resist the urgency of her or his own concerns, and attend to the concerns of those students who simply want to understand exactly what the textbook means at any given point. Good textbooks offer the perfect opportunity to consider some of the main issues that perplex the relationship between learning and teaching.
