The Web-based Language & Style Course  

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Investigation & Aims

Educational philosophy

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LAMEL Department

Lancaster University

 

Course and Experiment Instructions for investigators/tutors

The Investigation

  • A comparison of two teaching methods for an introductory stylistic course (called 'Language and Style'):

    • A web-based learning format

    • A traditional lecture/seminar-based format

This will involve providing the WWW-based and traditional lecture-seminar formats side-by-side to parallel groups of students, and monitoring both groups using a common set of methods. The course content for the two versions of the course is very similar, but not identical.

Aims

  • To compare student responses and learning outcomes to WWW-based and more traditional teaching of stylistic analysis.

Level

  • The course is an introductory stylistics course, aimed primarily at first-year undergraduates at Lancaster University, UK, studying English Language as one of their three first year subjects.

  • Other investigators may wish to use the course with other student groups that they feel it is appropriate for. The Lancaster students are first year English Language undergraduates, but elsewhere the course might perhaps be useful at a range of student levels (from the last years of school study through the various undergraduate levels up to and including MA level), depending upon the previous experience and knowledge of the students, whether they are native speakers of English, and so on. It would be helpful, however, if you discussed such variations in detail with Mick Short.

Selection of Experimental Groups

  • In Lancaster, students taking the Language and Style course in 2003-4 will experience the course in www-based mode. In 2004-5 students will experience the course in traditional lecture / seminar mode.

  • Other investigators may wish to use other group-selection methods, in which case they should discuss it with Mick Short.

Format

  • The lecture/seminar version of the course will take place in one ten week term ( 9 teaching weeks plus one reading week), with two lectures and one seminar (50 minutes each) in each teaching week. The course represents around 25% of a student's time in that term.

  • The web-based version of the course will also involve three classes (50 minutes each), in the form of computer lab-based workshops.

  • Other investigators can vary the overall formats for the two versions of the course just described, as long as they (i) maintain a reasonable equivalence between experimental groups, and (ii) discuss the variations in detail with Mick Short.

  • When we first began designing the experiment we assumed that it would be best if collaborators replicated the Lancaster investigation fairly closely. Now, however, we are happy for there to be considerable variation in the form of the investigation and how it is conducted, as long as the design of your investigation stands up. If you want to describe the form of your investigation and discuss its practicalities, please mail Mick Short.

 

Articles about the course and the investigation

Two articles, one about the traditional version of the course (McIntyre 2003) and one about the WWW-based course and the overall investigation (Short and Archer 2003) can be accessed directly below. These two articles are posted here for Co-investigators with the kind permission of the editorial board of the journal Style, in which they were originally published. We are most grateful for the journal's support.

Below we give full bibliographical references to the above two articles and also other articles written about earlier versions of the course. We also attach a draft of an article Mick has written (‘Designing and piloting a world-wide-web-based stylistics course’) which is due to be published in 2006 in ‘Andrea Gerbig and Anja Müller-Wood (eds.) Rethinking English: Reconciling Literature, Linguistics and Cultural Studies (Lampeter: Edwin Mellen)

Recently Dawn has talked about our preliminary findings from the pilot investigation in the PALA conference in Istanbul (Mick could not be there because of examining commitments in the UK). The PowerPoint file containing the slides used at the conference and also Dawn's notes, indicating roughly what she intended to say about each slide can be viewed below.

Below is a PowerPoint display that Mick used in a conference in Trier, Germany in September 2003. The article ‘Designing and piloting a world-wide-web-based stylistics course’ is effectively a write-up of that conference presentation.

References

Breen, M.P and M. Short (1988) 'Alternative Approaches in Teaching Stylistics to Beginners' Parlance 1, 2, 29-48.

Short, M (1993) 'Stylistics Upside Down: Using Stylistics in the Teaching of Language and Literature', Textus VI, 3-30 (reprinted in R. Carter and J. McRae (1996) Language, Literature and the Learner, Longman, 41-64).

McIntyre, D. (2003) 'Foregrounding foregrounding: reflections on foregrounding theory as a teaching methodology in a lecture course on stylistics', Style 37, 1: 1-13.

Short, M. and D. Archer (2002) 'Investigating the Effectiveness of WWW-based Stylistics Teaching', CUE Newsletter.

Short, M. and D. Archer (2003) 'Designing a Worldwide Web-Based Stylistics Course and Investigating its Effectiveness' Style 37, 1: 27-46.

Short, M. and MP Breen (1988) 'Innovations in the Teaching of Literature (1): Putting Stylistics in its Place', Critical Quarterly 30, 2, 1, 1-8.

Draft of an article Mick has written (‘Designing and piloting a world-wide-web-based stylistics course’) which is due to be published in 2006 in ‘Andrea Gerbig and Anja Müller-Wood (eds.) Rethinking English: Reconciling Literature, Linguistics and Cultural Studies (Lampeter: Edwin Mellen)

 

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