A textured and sensory grammar for the experience of reading

ABSTRACT

This paper explores the application of texture and textual attractors within a cognitive stylistic pedagogy for English teachers. Texture, defined as the feeling of building and experiencing a fictional world, is here taken up as a facilitative way of thinking about how reading, language, experience and cognition operate in the classroom. On the basis of data generated from a three-year, classroom-based, collaborative research project in the UK, I discuss how teachers and students drew on and used these cognitive stylistic concepts in their explorations of a literary text. I show how classroom discourse reveals ways in which teachers and students drew benefits from the pedagogy in a variety of ways: through conceptual interpretations of grammatical form; by allowing readers to describe their reading experiences in systematic ways, and by working with a spatially, sensory and experientially orientated grammar which is built on what readers already know about the world.

KEYWORDS:

• Texture
• cognitive stylistics
• grammar pedagogy
• reader–response

Acknowledgments

Thank you to the teachers and students who took part in this study, and to the school for granting permission for the research to take place. Thank you also to two anonymous reviewers for their useful feedback on an earlier version of this paper, and to Peter Stockwell for his encouragement in using this framework in this way.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ian Cushing

Ian Cushing is a Lecturer in the Department of Education at Brunel University London, with research interests in grammar pedagogy and critical language policy.