Masayuki Teranishi, Associate Professor, University of Hyogo

Abstract

Regrettably, many English teachers in Japan take a negative attitude towards using a literary text in their classroom and one of the depressing consequences is ‘dumbing down’ of (English) education.  On the other hand, in English teaching classrooms overseas, especially in EU countries such as the Netherlands and Hungary, literary texts play a significant role and some examples, in which pedagogical stylistic approaches were applied, were demonstrated in Poetics and Linguistics Association (PALA) 2010 conference held in Genoa.  Considering the basic principle of pedagogical stylistics and the merits evident in those classrooms, in this presentation I would like to discuss how pedagogical stylistics works in English education in Japan.  To support my argument, I shall invite you to watch my own demonstration lesson held for Japanese English teachers in the Kinki Region, in which Thomas Hardy’s poem, ‘The Oxen’, and Virginia Woolf’s letter were employed pedagogical stylistically for the English lesson of the lower-intermediate Japanese and Chinese students.  I shall also argue that pedagogical stylistics should be able to work not only in English literary texts but also in nonliterary texts, such as English lyrics and advertisements, and even in Japanese texts.  Throughout the presentation, therefore, I would emphasize that pedagogical stylistics is one of the best preventives for ‘dumbing down’ of education.

Biographical data

Masayuki Teranishi is an associate professor at the School of Human Science and Environment, the University of Hyogo, Japan. He obtained an MA in English Literary Studies at the University of Nottingham, and in 2004 a PhD at the University of Leeds.  His current interests lie in English stylistics, specifically in the study of modernist fiction, cognitive stylistics, and pedagogical stylistics.  His publication includes; ‘A Stylistic Analysis of Herzog: A Mode of “Postmodern Polyphony”’(Language and Literature 16 (1), 2007), Polyphony in Fiction: A Stylistic Analysis of Middlemarch, Nostromo, and Herzog (Peter Lang, 2008), Britain Today: Old Certainties, New Contradictions (Cengage Learning, 2009, coauthored with Paul Hullah), and A Socio-Cultural History of UK Rock Music (Cengage Learning, 2011 forthcoming, coauthored with Paul Hullah).