English writing is one of the four indispensable skills that English learners need to master, but unfortunately, many Chinese college students have much difficulty composing clear, concise and coherent essays although they have studied English for at least over six years. To address the problem, the researchers and teachers in China have tried…

This article aims at studying intertextuality in three different texts. These texts are: 1) Kierkegaard's "Fear and Trembling" 2) Salinger's "Franny and Zooey" and 3) Mehrjui's "Hamoon". To this end, Genette's (1997) concepts and ideas have been adapted. The main concepts are intertextuality and its three types:…

This article focuses on linguistic and cognitive characteristics inherent in the composition of the English postmodern tales written by J.K. Rowling. The composition of the text is viewed as linguistic and cognitive construal that integrates compositional plot structure, compositional meaning structure, linguistic and stylistic means of their…

Why do educators teach literature? The author thinks they can hear the answer in the voice of Huckleberry Finn and David Copperfield and Holden Caulfield and the omniscient narrator in "Beloved." It's the wonderful sound of those words, the gorgeous flow of those well-crafted sentences, and the marvelous way Twain and Dickens and Morrison and…

At a time when political leaders and media pundits seek to narrow the English curriculum and reduce its knowledge structure to the "basics," it is helpful to revisit the potential of different approaches to learning in English that have evolved over time. In this paper I reflect on the semantic features of personal growth, cultural…

The purpose of the present study is to find out the features of English business letters. Halliday's systemic functional linguistics is used as the theoretical framework, mainly, interpersonal fucntion. The English business letter (EBL) is an important written text used for international business communication and it has its own features of text.…

The texts and classroom activities in this paper are a sample of those used within a unit on "The Battle for Survival". The unit brings classic Australian literary texts together with reportage on contemporary news events, and demonstrates an integrated approaches to the Literacy, Language and Literature strands of the AC:E. The unit…

Seventy-seven new academics--59 at a large, public university in the UK and 18 at a medium-sized, private comprehensive university in the USA--were asked to read an extract of an article on the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) and mark the text according to categories of difficulty or dislike. Analysis of the data revealed six main…

Questions the conventional assumption that reference books should simply be regarded as objective containers of information, and argues that personal style is sometimes an important element in the evaluation of reference books and that subjectivity and expressions of feeling may be as valuable as objectivity, detachment, and impersonality. (23…

Presents diverse theories and concepts of style. A step-by-step analytical procedure for the stylistic examination of texts is provided, which ranges from a brief summary to which other levels of analysis are related, through diction, register tone, punctuation, clausal and sentence types, paragraphing, schemes of construction, and figures of…

This article analyzes the function of deixis in the poetry of the 20th century Italian, Eugenio Montale, in particular, his "In limine." The main objective is to show how deixis is involved in the dynamic relationship between text and reader. A constant problem in Montale's texts is that of a disharmony felt by the poetic voice with the…

Studies by Unsworth and Williams (1988, 1990) compared the textual variation of purpose-written big books with literary texts. Purpose-written big books help children to predict repetitive clauses that realize explicit and simplistic meanings. (Contains six references.) (JP)

Describes an undergraduate student module that was developed at the University of Exeter (United Kingdom) in which students made their own computer graphics to discover and to describe literary structures in texts of their choice. Discusses learning outcomes and refers to the Web site that shows students' course work. (Author/LRW)