This chapter discusses the teaching of literary awareness to high-school students of English as a foreign language (EFL). Dedicated to the topic of iconicity, the proposed pedagogical experience stimulates students to work out the connection between visual and linguistic representations, identify such links in a variety of texts, create their own concrete poems, and justify their stylistic choices. Three sources of data are used: (i) questionnaires detailing participants’ profiles, (ii) students’ answers and creative writing, and (iii) unit evaluation questionnaires. The data obtained enabled an evidence-based evaluation of the workshop from the participants’ viewpoint. We argue that evaluating students’ learning empirically should be part and parcel of any pedagogical experience.

In recent years, researchers have conducted empirical studies in reader response, which have either contested or confirmed earlier theories. Indeed, the 1970s and 1980s saw the shift from interpreting the page to looking into reading processes, but the studies remained on the level of abstraction. Our study follows the trend towards evidence-grounded investigations by examining real readers' reactions to poetry and innovates by looking into cross-cultural receptions of a poem in its original and translated versions. To verify whether responses to poetry are universal or culture specific, a rigorous method was adopted: 500 humanities undergraduate students from two different countries (Brazil and Ukraine) were asked to read Poe's "The Lake" and to gauge their reactions using a questionnaire with a fifteen-item semantic differential scale. Participants read either the original version in English (i.e., a foreign language to them) or its translation into their mother tongue (Portuguese, Russian, or Ukrainian). The results point to statistically significant differences within and between the groups. The findings indicate that firsthand responses to poetry are largely culture specific and that the translations also influence reactions.

No abstract

Creative writing workshops in high-school English-as-a-foreign-language education have had little attention from researchers so far. Addressing this gap, this paper investigates the creative production of Brazilian high-school students after a workshop unit on iconicity. Their iconic poems are analysed visually, thematically and stylistically. Despite variation in students' self-identified language proficiency, the results show that the poems presented visual and thematic diversity. The stylistic analysis evidenced the richness of students' creations notwithstanding their lack of English proficiency. Although some surface language infelicities are identified, these do not limit their expression. Overall, the findings reveal that iconicity was not only an appropriate topic for these students, but it also proved to be a genuine way by means of which they could freely express their individuality, breaking away with conventions, reflecting on a variety of matters, and registering their observation of the world and of themselves.

The growing number of recent publications on pedagogical stylistics indicates that this area is still of much interest to those who invest in the integration of language and literature. However, evidencebased assessments of pedagogical stylistics are still few and depend mostly on teachers' intuitions. The present study contributes towards filling this gap by examining 28 reflective accounts produced by highschool English as a foreign language (EFL) teenagers who participated in a literary awareness workshop on iconicity. Branching out from pedagogical stylistics, literary awareness is here described as a program which aims at sensitizing students to verbal artistry. The bottom-up analysis of the participants' accounts reveals five main aspects -"applicability," "learning," "materials," "students" and "teaching" -and indicates that the workshop was to a certain degree transformative. Instead of an instrumental approach to language learning, the workshop aimed mostly at consciousness-raising. Students' assessment of the workshop was quite positive, and they linked in-class experience with their lives outside the school. The results indicate that, besides learning a foreign language, the process of reflection has led students beyond the text. We conclude by discussing the implications of the workshop for both pedagogy and research. KeywordsPedagogical stylistics, literary awareness, critical pedagogy, English language teaching and learning, English as a foreign language, high school, student appraisal, empirical approach IntroductionSince Jakobson (1960) called for the integration of linguistics and poetics, several stylisticians have worked towards combining his theoretical postulations with classroom applications (e.g.