The first aim of teaching English literature has always been for the student to gain enjoyment from, and acquire skill in, reading. Further goals point to the affective development of pupils involving such qualities as critical thinking and expressing views, empathetic understanding of other people, moral awareness and increased self-knowledge and self-understanding. These are indeed laudable aims, but examiners have always had difficulties in examining them adequately to satisfy the critics. Teachers often doubt that they achieve such lofty aims. These very aims have the sceptics sneering at the discipline because such qualities cannot be measured and the pupil's worth for the workplace cannot be satisfactorily assessed. This has resulted in the merit of the study of literature being questioned and usually found wanting. Therefore, on the one hand, this research looks for a method of studying literature which will ensure that the study will be neccesary and desirable today and into the foreseeable future. On the other hand, the socio-political changes in South Africa, particularly since 1992, have offered a possible area of research to complement the first. During the past few years, South Africans have been forced to recognise the fact that a multitude of different races and people live and work together more closely in this country and yet they know nothing, or very little, of one another. Thus this research also investigates the addition of a cultural component to literature study to help young people gain empathetic understanding of different cultures and of their own cultures as well, to be able to live together in harmony. With this approach, pupils may conceivably be educated through literature, to become well-adjusted, critical, effective adults so that they may play their role as citizens and shapers of their increasingly complex, multi-cultural society. Because of the context of literature study, in which this personal growth takes place, the aims identified above may be measured and assessed to suit both the sceptics and the devotees of literature study.

This study applies Sperber and Wilson's relevance theory to the comprehension of figurative language in poetry. Students' understanding of metaphor as a linguistic category and comprehension of metaphorical texts are analysed in terms of the principle of relevance. Patterns of comprehension in English first language (Ll) and English second language (ESL) students' analyses of metaphorical texts are discussed and through an analysis of similarities and differences in these patterns of comprehension an attempt is made to develop a pedagogy around relevance theory. Relevance theory's particular emphasis on the role played by "context" in cognition is seen to have significance for the teaching of literature in South African universities. Relevance theory's account of cognition generates a range of educational principles which could be specifically applied to the teaching of metaphor. An appraisal of the strengths and difficulties students experience in expressing their understanding of metaphor in an academic context is included. This was done to further develop relevance theory into a pedagogical approach which takes into account the academic context in which writing occurs. The investigation of the particular difficulties that English metaphor poses for ESL students entailed acquiring a working knowledge of the ways in which metaphor is taught and assessed in DET schools. The interpretations of students of different linguistic, social and educational backgrounds reveal unifying elements that could be incorporated into a pedagogy based on relevance theory. Such a pedagogy would be appropriate to the multilingual/multicultural/multiracial nature of classes in South African universities and would be a more empowering approach to the teaching of English metaphor.

M.A. (Applied Linguistics) / Please refer to full text to view abstract

M.A. (Applied Linguistics) / To account for the characteristic linguistic needs of second language students, psycholinguistic theories of second language acquisition are taken into account. Sociolinguistic factors such as possible future language policies regarding English in the South African context, and societal attitudes towards English are also considered. An overview of the more significant approaches and methods in second language teaching is followed by a brief survey of undergraduate ESL courses in South Africa and other third world countries ...

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The purpose of this study was to set up equivalent groups of conventional and experimental classes in English in order to test both groups with certain standardized tests before and after a definite period of instruction, and to evaluate the relative efficiency of the two teaching methods in light of the statistical evidence.

This study represents a survey of selected eighth-grade students of San Joaquin County and the measurement of their ability and achievement in certain aspects of the Language Arts program of the elementary school.

What does it mean to listen—and how can works of literature teach us about listening? Of the four modes of language—reading, writing, speaking, and listening—that together constitute the “language arts” as a curriculum area in secondary English education, listening is relatively undertheorized—and conspicuously so, given the prominence of student engagement and culturally-responsive pedagogy in scholarly and popular education writing. Western thought generally prioritizes the act of speaking or the concept of “voice” in conceiving of subjects and agency, and an emphasis on “finding your voice” and “having your say” implies questions about the modes of reception by which any particular voice actually might be heard. In the classroom, listening during discussion of literature, for instance, can be an enriching and even revelatory experience for students and their teacher. This dissertation, which is variously theoretical, historical, and narrative, often captures the drama of classrooms and sometimes contemplates the communities that sponsor them. Grounded in some concerns of the teacher as listener as well as a sense of wonder and surprise in the literature classroom (Chapters 1 and 6), this dissertation is a series of contiguous explorations of ideas about listening in educational theory and pragmatist aesthetics (Chapter 2); psychoanalysis and rhetorical studies (Chapter 3); literary history and criticism (Chapter 4); historical poetics (Chapter 5), as well as particular works of literature (Chapters 4 and 8). While discourses about literature or literary experience since at least the Renaissance arguably privilege visual metaphors for the literary imagination—as a way of “seeing” the lives of others across distances of place and time, as well as “reflections of” oneself in these others’—a parallel and even more ancient tradition among poet-critics invokes the sonorous, elaborating auditory metaphors for understanding the experience of reading itself as a kind of listening. Listening not only refers to modes of sociality, or relating to and with others in ways that manifest communicative exchange, shared experience, or mutual recognition but, importantly, also refers to an inner experience that to some extent remains private. Listening therefore instantiates a certain double consciousness. Like the imaginative participation of reading, listening is a temporal experience of engaging with the other as such—that is, an encounter with difference that might become an occasion for transformative learning.