Michael Burke

Sonia Zyngier

Olivia Fialho

Scientific Approaches to Literature in Learning Environments is not just about what takes place in literary classrooms. Settings do have a strong influence on student learning both directly and indirectly. These spaces may include the home, the workplace, science centers, libraries, that is, contexts that entail diverse social, physical, psychological, and pedagogical variables that facilitate learning, for example, by grouping desks in specific ways, utilizing audio, visual, and digital technologies. Scientific Approaches to Literature in Learning Environments puts together a series of empirical research studies on the different locations of teaching and learning. These studies represent literary learning environment throughout the world, including Brazil, the USA, China, Canada, Japan and several European countries such as the Netherlands, Ukraine, the UK and Malta. The studies reported describe quantitative and/or qualitative research and cover pre-primary, primary, high school, college, university, and lifelong learning environments. They refresh the enigmatic ambience that often surrounds the teaching and learning that goes on in literary studies and offer transparent, useful and replicable research and practice. Students and teachers alike are encouraged to take them and own them.

Scientific Approaches to Literature in Learning Environments

For the first time, the works on stylistics by one of the most brilliant linguists of our times are collected in a single volume. This book highlights the evolution of John Sinclair’s theories and insights from studies on language teaching through detailed analyses of text and discourse, and into his later works on corpus stylistics. More specifically, Part I focuses on how theory can inform teaching practice. Part II is more directed towards linguistic analyses of specific texts and provides practical bases for stylistic approaches. In Part III, Sinclair’s contributions to discourse analysis shed light on ways of looking and understanding literature. Written in his crisp clear, straightforward style, this book demonstrates Sinclair’s explicit concern for more systematic approaches to the integration of language and literature and shows why his works on stylistics have been both reference and inspiration to students, language and literature teachers and researchers over many decades.

Selected works of John McH. Sinclair

Language, Discourse, Style

Frank Hakemulder

Willie van Peer

This is a textbook that has been needed for decades. It should be required reading for every student (and professor) in literary studies and, for that matter, in any humanistic discipline. Humanistic methods of inquiry certainly have their place, but all too often humanistic scholars present entire theories and have no idea how to test them or even realize that they should be tested in a scientific manner. Such scholars can only try to convince readers that they are right. It is absurd to use rhetoric when there are perfectly good empirical methods of testing such theories. If they are not so tested, they are quite likely to lead us astray. In a very engaging way, the authors almost seduce readers into wanting to learn about empirical methods and statistics. The book is full of suggested projects for students. Students are led through how to search sources such as PsycInfo in order to get ideas and then gradually introduced to basic statistics and shown in detail how to analyze data that they themselves may have gathered. By focusing on practical matters and not bothering much with formulas that will soon be forgotten, readers are given a good intuitive grasp of not just simple statistics but also statistics at an intermediate level.

Sonia Zyngier

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