A Way in: A Stylistic Analysis of Poetry

Abstract

Language and literature would seem to be related, but a review of the literature of language learning finds them often worlds apart. Since 1945, literature and especially poetry have been excluded from most language learning programmes, largely because of an emphasis on the study, rather than the reading, of literature (Gilroy-Scott, 1983). Literary criticism continued to focus on interpretation, and the field of linguistics had little to say about literature beyond the sentence level (Ching et al. 1980). The grammar-translation approach to language learning utilized literary texts, but with no attempt to establish their relevance beyond the arena of cultural understanding; we were reminded that literature was its own reward, along perhaps with a worn-out dictionary. The subsequent advent of the audiolingual approach had even less use for literary texts, when compared to the careful and gradual accumulation of correct linguistic structures (Widdowson, 1982). Since then, however, a substantial body of language learning theory has focused on the communicative basis of language. With this socio-cultural shift in our perspective has come a renewed interest for the integration of literature into language learning programs. Additional support for this perspective comes from recent research in psycholinguistics and reading and the corresponding view that the reader is an active participant who brings meaning and value to a particular text (Goodman, 1967; Smith, 1973).