Stylistics in Second Language Contexts: A Critical Perspective

Abstract

This chapter investigates the value of stylistics in educational situations where learners are reading, discussing and re-working texts in an ‘additional’ language (Block 2003: 57), that is, a language which they would not consider their own most fluent communicative resource, and with an aim to better their understanding and uses of the language of the text(s) addressed. Stylistics is nowadays generally contextualized and discourse-based (Verdonk, 2002; Simpson, 2004), focusing on issues of choices of style, register, genre, culture and identities in varying contexts. My understanding of language learning is of ‘appropriation’ or ‘participation’, whereby learners seek, often in difficult cir¬cumstances, to make creative use of the resources or ‘affordances’ previous language uses offer for their own developing communicative purposes (Lantolf, 2000; van Lier, 2004) illustrated by Kramsch (2000), discussed below. What is known of the contribution stylistics might make to the aims of this more widely conceived literary, cultural and general language education, empirically, as opposed to asserted or speculated, as will appear, is rather thin. What we all need to understand better are the possibilities for stylistic interventions in our own classrooms and curricula. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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