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Transcript: 'Meet Your Tutors Video'
(Video Clip)
Dawn:
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Hello, and welcome to the web-based version of Language and
Style a course that was originally designed for students here
at Lancaster University and is often referred to by its course code:
Ling131. My name is Dawn Archer. I was a student here of the lecture-based
Language and Style course and was taught by Mick Short, Professor
of English Language and Literature at Lancaster University. Mick
and I have since worked together to produce this web-based version,
which is to be available to Lancaster students and students in other
institutions. I'm going to be asking Mick some questions about Language
and Style to help you get a better sense of the course. I suppose
you should think of me as Language and Style's very own "virtual
student".
Mick, can I ask you: can you tell us a little bit about the type
of course that Language and Style is, and what it covers?
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Mick:
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Well I suppose in some ways it would be better called "Language,
Style, Meaning and Effect", but that's a bit long for a course title.
Essentially what we are interested in is how, when people read texts
(in particular literary texts), how they manage to get from the
words on the page to the meanings in their heads. How they get from
the words on the page to the effects that the texts have on them.
How when they read the words on the page they manage to come to
abstractions like character, characterisation and plot, and also
how it is, when they read the words on the page, they manage to
be able to work out, even if they don't know in advance, that this
bit of work is by one particular author rather than another. In
other words they recognise the style of the writing. And that's
why this area of study is often called 'Stylistics', because it
started off looking at the relationship between language in the
text and authorial style. But essentially we're interested in the
relationship between the language of the text and all those
things.
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Dawn:
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Okay, so are all three of the major literary genres examined?
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Mick:
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Yes. We'll start off looking at poetry, then there'll be some work
on prose fiction and towards the end of the course, work on drama.
But we won't just do texts from literature, so, for example, when
we look at poetry, near the beginning of the course, we'll also
spend a bit of time on advertising and the names of pop groups as
well, because actually there turn out to be interesting linguistic
similarities between the language of poetry and the language of
advertising, for example.
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Dawn:
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So what, then, are the aims of the Language and Style course?
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Mick:
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Well basically what we want to do is to enable students to be able
to analyse the texts that they read, in order to show how it is
that the meanings the style and so on come about. We want to get
them into a situation whereby at the end of the course they should
be able to go away and analyse new texts on their own. That means
that, in effect, we need to teach them "tools of analysis". And
as they go along, they will get more and more tools of analysis,
so that by the end they'll have a complete set, more or less. That's
one of the reasons why I like to refer to these tools of analysis
as my "Stylistician's Toolkit", and indeed, that's why we're using
the notion of the Stylistician's toolkit as the basic metaphor for
the web-based version of the course.
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Dawn:
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Perhaps it would help if you could give us some examples of the
kind of things you will look at.
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Mick:
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OK. Let's take a couple of jokes. One of them is up here. This
is a joke by a man called Sam Levinson, he said: Somewhere on
this globe, every ten seconds, there's a woman giving birth to
a child.
She must be found and stopped. This joke depends upon the fact
that the phrase "a woman" in English has two different kinds of
reference: it can be used to refer to women in general so it could
be referring to any woman on the planet (which is what happens
in the first sentence), or it could be used to refer to one individual,
a particular woman that we happen to be talking about. And notice
what happens here is that in the first sentence you get the generic
reading, in the second sentence you get a specific, particular
reading. But the word 'she' at the beginning of the second sentence
refers back to the generic woman in the first sentence, so that's
where the joke comes from.
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Dawn:
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Right, have you a second example for us?
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Mick:
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Yes, OK, this is an extract of a letter from a tenant to a landlord:
the tenant writes: Will you please send someone to mend our cracked
sidewalk.
Yesterday my wife tripped on it and is now pregnant. Now clearly
this must be an American writer, because it says "sidewalk" rather
than "pavement" as you'd expect in British English for example.
But there's also a joke, obviously, that has to do with the fact
that the sentences make it look as if tripping over the sidewalk
over the cracked paving stone makes the woman pregnant. What's going
on there is that there's a clash in our assumptions between what
we know about the real world and our assumptions about language
and how it works. So in the real world we know that people get pregnant
as a consequence of having sexual relations. But in language we
assume that if somebody is describing something, they will describe
the elements in the order in which they occur, so that the order
of the language mirrors the order of the events. And we expect those
events to be connected together in a sequence of cause and effect.
So, in effect, the language is telling us that tripping over the
pavement causes the pregnancy. But that clashes with what we know
about how the world works. So we're interested in trying to explain
how effects and meanings come about. There's a sense in which you
might claim that talking about the jokes in that kind of way kills
them stone dead. But of course you have already heard them and enjoyed
them before you analysed them. And, for me at least, what happens
is that analysing them in that way, makes me understand and appreciate
much better the skill that the joke-maker has in producing the joke
in the first place.
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Dawn:
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OK. You've talked about your own appreciation, can I ask you what
you're expecting from the students themselves?
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Mick:
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Well, I think first of all to enjoy the course. I'm very much a
proponent of the idea that learning should be fun, that people learn
better if they enjoy what they do. And we'll try to make the course
fun for them. Obviously we expect them to enjoy reading the literary
texts that we will be looking at, but we would also like them to
enjoy doing the analyses and get that sense of appreciation of texts
that they are looking at, by looking at them in analytical detail.
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Dawn:
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It sounds like a very "hands on" type of approach. Would you agree?
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Mick:
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Oh yes, very much so. In every single session of the course there
will be lots of places where students have to practise little bits
of analysis of various kinds. So it's important if they're going
to learn the skills, that they analyse as they go along. So we expect
them all of the time to be active, doing things, practising skills
in order to be able to use them, at the end of the course, on other
things entirely.
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Dawn:
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It sounds as though you've given quite a lot of thought to the
structure of the Language and Style course. Could you explain
it a little more for us?
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Mick:
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Sure. I suppose the first thing to say is that we've divided the
course up into a number of sessions and we've numbered those sessions
on a menu on the screen, because we think there's an order which
is the best order for students to go through those sessions. Then,
inside each session, again there's a kind of ordering that we think
is probably the best way to do it. Now we know full well that students
never do what you tell them and we also know that people on the
web in particular buzz about all over the place. But we thought
it would be helpful if we gave some indication of what we thought
was a sensible order. So we'll start off looking at poetry, and
then prose fiction, and then drama, and we've organised things in
a way that we hope will lead people from relatively straight-forward
ideas to more complex ones as the course goes on.
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Dawn:
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OK. So what's the best way for the students to do the course in
practical terms?
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Mick:
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Well, obviously for some people they'll just be sitting at their
computer by themselves and they just have to interact with the materials
that we produce. But in many ways I think the optimal situation
would be to have two or three people sitting at the same computer,
doing the task together and talking about the tasks as they do them.
I think people often forget when they're trying to learn, that their
co-students are a big learning resource. So it's important for them
to learn from one another as well as learn from us.
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Dawn:
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Now one question I know that students will want to know the answer
to is assessment. Can you tell us what the assessment of the
Language and Style course is - what form it takes?
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Mick:
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Well, obviously it may vary from one institution to another if
other institutions are using the course, but in Lancaster what will
happen will be that students will have to do a piece of coursework
assessment at the end of the course. And then after that they'll
also have to do an examination. The coursework assessment will be
analysing a text because that's what the course is about, and what
we've done is to structure learning about the assessment into learning
about the analytical tools. So there will be three texts (a poem,
an extract from prose fiction, an extract from drama) and students
can choose one of them to analyse at the end of the course. But
we're going to have elements in each session of the course whereby
they apply the analytical skills to all three texts, so that they
build up a kind of portfolio as they go along which they can then
use as the basis for writing their assessment at the end of the
course.
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Dawn:
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OK. As the students seem to interact with the texts almost immediately,
is there any prior knowledge of either language or literature they
need before starting the course?
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Mick:
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I don't think any specific prior knowledge is needed. Obviously
students who have read quite a lot of literature and have studied
it will probably have a bit of an advantage. And similarly students
who have done a bit of work on English Language already or Linguistics
will have a bit of an advantage. But we're arranging the course
in a way so that we're assuming that students don't know much about
either of those things before they start, except at a very general,
basic "school" knowledge if you like, because we can't know in advance
what each individual knows and doesn't know. So we're assuming a
kind of "blank sheet" as it were.
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Dawn:
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Right. Have you got any further advice that you'd like to share
with the students?
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Mick:
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Well, as I said before, enjoy what you do - I mean I want it to
be fun - and make sure that you do do all of the practical work,
because it's the practice at doing things that's important. And
I guess the other bit of advice would be: don't worry if you make
mistakes. Most of my students get very upset if they make mistakes
and sometimes they don't want to talk in class because of that.
But actually I make mistakes all the time too and, for me, making
mistakes is an important part of the learning process. It helps
me understand what I've not understood properly before. So "have
a go" I think would be the answer. And make mistakes, and learn
from them, and enjoy doing it, and don't be embarrassed.
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Dawn:
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Well, thank you, Mick. I think you've provided a detailed outline
of the course on the web pages
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