As Nigel Fabb has shown in a recent Newsletter article (1), the relationship between English Language and English Literature in HE institutions is not a straightforward one. Many of the complexities that inevitably characterize transactions across the border between these two ‘sub–disciplines’ were unpicked in an event held earlier this year, co-convened by Ben Knights and Richard Steadman- Jones (University of Sheffield).
Participants circulated to each other samples of module descriptors and other papers as preparation for the workshop. Those present represented institutions where there were modules or strands of modules in which literature teaching was inflected with terms and practices drawn from linguistics. Language was a core component of a degree programme at two of the institutions represented. Most of those present worked in larger staff groups, though three were in effect the only language teachers within literature–oriented units. Strengths and weaknesses were identified in both situations: thus ‘benign neglect’ could be experienced as both in some ways liberating (freedom to invent modules that interest you; ‘literary stylistics are what I say they are’) but also as intellectually isolating. There was nevertheless a clear implication that it is entirely possible to run successful linguistic–inflected modules without having a whole language team.
To define some parameters for discussion, Richard Steadman-Jones took as a case study the development of the combined Language – Literature BA at Sheffield. This experience and straw polls of students led to a number of questions and observations:
• What is the most effective way to teach basic skills?
• How does institutional environment shape what you do? For example, how receptive are literature colleagues when students employ approaches taken from stylistics?
• How might pedagogy relate to our own research interests? How can teaching be made more research led?
• Should we be open to the idea of teaching-led research?
• What mix of A and AS levels have students experienced?
Teaching the Basics
The issue of basic skills has important connections with the history of academic linguistics. As soon as the new linguistics started to impact on literary studies in the 970s it was evident that this was a field with marked pedagogic implications. The systematic structure of linguistics enabled teachers to put tools in student hands, and to employ simple building blocks, which could cumulatively become more sophisticated intellectual structures. Here was a conceptual lexicon and set of taxonomies that required to be tackled in a structured way. There was a set of hard-edged technical skills which were ‘very teachable’, and very satisfying for students to learn. Even before the days of ‘learning outcomes’, you could specify clearly what might be learned in a particular session, and such skills exhibited a kind of transparency lacking in the vocabulary of literary criticism. The whole domain also gave considerable and so far under-exploited scope for students to undertake research themselves. In a subject area with a low degree of consensus about the core, conceptions of what the basics actually were would tend to reflect the research allegiances of staff. In a real sense it was impossible not to teach your research, even within programmes where there was little scope for teaching specialist options.
Lecturers could fortify student confidence by building on and making explicit knowledge that had up till then been implicit. Effectively we could say to students ‘you are linguists already’, and provide them with the tools for articulating what they in some sense already knew or could already hear. A parallel was noted with the reflection on skills embedded in systems of PDP, and indeed language study was felt to lend itself especially well to being able to explain what you had learned. From week one, language study also enabled devolution to students, giving them tools and a sequence of activities. Again, there was strong convergence with the potential of VLEs.
Institutional and Intellectual Allegiances
One recurrent theme of the day concerned the borders and territories which shaped allegiance and practice. Following a presentation by Cris Yelland (University of Teesside) on teaching language within a literature environment, a number of territories and boundary crossings were identified. These included intellectual allegiances (schools, traditions, conceptual vocabularies), and the archaeology of individual institutions (the actual geographical relations and degree of polarisation of ‘School of English Language’ / ‘School of English Literature’). The linguistic source field had changed with the rise of pragmatics and as ‘critical discourse analysis’ had separated out from ‘literary linguistics’, and ‘linguistic criticism’. It was noted that much of the High Theory of the 980s had been as hostile to linguistics as had Literary Criticism previously. Other fraught borders were those between diachrony and synchrony (while there were stylisticians who were historicists, most literature people were highly suspicious of the tendency of linguistic analysis to de–contextualise), between description and evaluation (despite the canon wars a strong aura of ‘great bookishness’ was felt to hang over literary study), between aesthetics and science. These tensions worked themselves out at the level of curriculum and pedagogy. More recently, the explosion of creative writing, growing enthusiasm for the new Cognitivism, and the awesome power of Corpus Linguistics had all impacted on the field and created new alliances and even fields of study. All of them had direct and tangible pedagogic implications. While what Cris Yelland identified as the ‘Gramscian moment’ was probably past, there was a clear consensus that blends of literary and linguistic studies possessed enormous pedagogic and intellectual power.
Transition and Assessment
Participants agreed that the rise of English Language and Language and Literature at AS and A2 had had a major effect on the knowledge and understanding of many students (2). The effects of there being more students who had already studied language were however not unambiguous. At the best, there were students within any given cohort who possessed a working knowledge of terms and methods of analysis, but you could not make too much of what you assumed students would have learned. (Film Studies or Sociology A-levels were, it was felt, quite often a better preparation.) A-level English Language was seen as being mainly oriented towards Sociolinguistics. There was also the phenomenon one colleague described as ‘Boring! We did words at A-level!’ It was widely felt that HE teachers needed to instruct themselves in more detail about what is actually taught at A-level, and the syllabuses of the different examination boards (3). Much of the discussion of student transition and expectations gravitated towards wider concerns over standards of academic writing and preparedness, and here it was noted that linguistics – having licensed non–standard varieties in declaring itself non–prescriptive – needed to explain itself very carefully when laying down forms of academic English. Ways in which we could harness the synergy of Language and Literature in being hospitable towards the new generation of students might include:
• Use of forms of transformative writing and re-writing (exploit ‘creative language awareness’)
• Emphasis on drafting as a formative and pedagogic mode (cf. the ‘Speak-Write’ project at APU)
• Generally, a focus on acts of production
• More attention to rhetoric, persuasion, and language in use
It was felt that the subject matter lent itself to variety in assessment as much as it led to blended forms of teaching. Participants discussed:
• Imaginative use of a wider variety of forms of assessment to include learning logs, and portfolios (NB they take ‘forever’ to mark!). The subject domain lends itself to quizzes and multiple choice questions presented through VLEs, and to tightly–focused exercises and worksheets as well as more traditional discursive forms of analysis
• Making use of the web to get students building hypertexts of a poem or passage
• Making posters as a simpler form of hypertext
• Exploiting the enormous scope for students to gather and select materials and examples (though it was noted that literature students frequently preferred set essay questions)
Given rival varieties of terminology and approach, it was feared that we might sometimes be in the position of Father Christmas taking away presents given earlier. The inverse of this situation was a potential metacognitive gain, as students came to understand the provisional, heuristic, nature of terms and taxonomies and to comprehend the way in which knowledge is made.
Conclusions
The final discussion of outcomes turned to the resources and support needed by colleagues working in this area. It was recognised that (as always with events of this kind) many of the outcomes of the day could not be captured in simple lists: they would grow out of the dialogues of the day and feed back into individual practice, or into shaping participants’ sense of belonging to a larger community. There was a feeling that there was no call for a commissioned report on the topic at this stage. But some specific outcomes might be summarised:
• Various specific suggestions and websites to be circulated
• Some asked for suggestions for an accessible glossary of terms
• This was pre–eminently an area for collaboration between Subject Centres: the English Subject Centre should actively collaborate with the Subject Centre for Area Studies on another workshop with a more specific theme, e.g. teaching grammar
• A taxonomy of teaching practices (perhaps as part of the Subject Centre’s proposed teaching web area) – illustrative examples of integrating linguistic practice into literary teaching
• Explore feasibility of a JISC list for colleagues teaching on Language / Literature border.
Notes
1. ‘Linguistics in an English Department’, English Subject Centre Newsletter
8 (June 2005), pp. 5–9, available online at:
http://www.english.
heacademy.ac.uk/explore/publications/newsletters/newsissue8/fabb.htm.
2. See Adrian Barlow’s appendix to Four Perspectives on Transition
(English Subject Centre report Series No. 10, 2005), available online
at http://www.english.heacademy.ac.uk/explore/resources/transition/report.php.
3. For the specifications (now rebranded as ‘criteria’) for English A–levels see the website of the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority: http://www.qca.org.uk/2982.html.
