Seminar by Dr Marcello Giovanelli (Aston University) Text World Theory and teacher-oriented grammatics: Facilitating creativity, reading and writing in the classroom

Stylistics has both over time and more recently underpinned much work that has gone on in EFL teaching, work in English departments in higher education, and creative and professional writing programmes. However, its potential influence as a valuable pedagogical tool for secondary age students (11-18) has yet to be fully explored. This paper therefore argues for a stylistics-informed pedagogy in the secondary phase drawing on Halliday’s notion of ‘grammatics’ as a way of using knowledge about language ‘to think with’. Specifically, I argue that Text World Theory offers an example of what I term ‘teacher-oriented grammatics’ and provides a cognitively-informed updating of existing readers-response theories which have traditionally been seen as highly attractive by teachers.