Transcript: 'Meet Your Tutors Video'

Dawn:

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?

Mick:

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.

Dawn:

Okay, so are all three of the major literary genres examined?

Mick:

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.

Dawn:

So what, then, are the aims of the Language and Style course?

Mick:

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.

Dawn:

Perhaps it would help if you could give us some examples of the kind of things you will look at.

Mick:

Dawn:

Right, have you a second example for us?

Mick:

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.

Dawn:

OK. You've talked about your own appreciation, can I ask you what you're expecting from the students themselves?

Mick:

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.

Dawn:

It sounds like a very "hands on" type of approach. Would you agree?

Mick:

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.

Dawn:

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?

Mick:

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.

Dawn:

OK. So what's the best way for the students to do the course in practical terms?

Mick:

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.

Dawn:

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?

Mick:

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.

Dawn:

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?

Mick:

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.

Dawn:

Right. Have you got any further advice that you'd like to share with the students?

Mick:

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.

Dawn:

Well, thank you, Mick. I think you've provided a detailed outline of the course on the web pages