A Study on Corpus Stylistics Assisted English and American Literature Teaching

Tianjin Agricultural University,Tianjin,China Email:1906793549@qq.com

[Abstract]Innovation ability is one of the important objectives of training English majors,but the teaching methods and contents of English and American literature courses fail to highlight the cultivation of students’innovative ability.Based on the principles of corpus stylistics,this study illustrates the reform path of English and American literature teaching,and proposes the teaching method of corpus stylistics in understanding the language,theme and writing style of literary works.The study suggests that the analysis of key words,semantic prosody and language dissimilation should be used in the teaching of English and American literature to help students understand literary language,theme and author’s writing style.

[Keywords]innovation ability;corpus stylistics;teaching of English and American literature;teaching reform

Introduction

On May 28,2018,at the Conference of academicians of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Chinese Academy of Engineering,Chinese president gave a speech and set out the goal of China’s efforts to“become a major science center and innovation highland in the world”,while stressing that university students are“the future of innovation”.On February 23,2019,China’s Modernization of Education2035 was issued,which proposed to“strengthen the training of innovative talents,especially top-grade innovative talents”.This puts forward new requirements for the cultivation of English majors of higher education.In April 2020,the Ministry of Education promulgated theGuide for Undergraduate English Majors in Colleges and Universities(hereinafter referred to as theGuide),which stipulates that“innovation and entrepreneurship ability”is one of the necessary abilities for undergraduates majoring in English(Ministry of Education of institutions of higher learning foreign language literature specialty teaching steering committee of English teaching,2020,pp.1-2).The promulation and implementation of the Guide further points out the direction for English major personnel training and teaching reform in higher education.

English and American literatureis a compulsory course for English majors.However,the traditional teaching mode and method ofEnglish and American literaturecourses pay more attention to the knowledge of literature history than to the cultivation of students’innovation ability.In this study,the research object covers the Common Core Course in Specialty of English majors:Introduction to English Literature,and Specialty-Oriented Courses,such as

History of English Literature,History of American Literature,etc.Since the beginning of the new century,with the accelerating development of informatization and internationalization,the practical application of English has been widely emphasized.Many colleges and universities pay more attention to the training of English majors as the applicationoriented talents,than to the accumulation of students’literary knowledge and the improvement of their Innovation ability.Professor Guo Yingjian once stated that“Colleges and universities have added more practical courses,paying special attention to English listening and speaking,so as to strengthen students’practical ability to use foreign languages.By contrast,the teaching of‘English-American literature’has been marginalized.”(Guo,2017,p.42)Furthermore,in the traditional mode of teaching,students just accept the points of view of former scholars and research trends,without forming the habit of independent thinking and in-depth exploration.Even if teachers integrate discussions,questions and answers into class,most students only have superficial subjective perception of literary works,which is far from the cultivation of ability of innovative thinking.This is not consistent with the training target of innovation ability for English majors in theGuide.Therefore,the teaching reform ofEnglish and American literaturecourses is imperative.

Students’innovation ability is embodied in the ability to obtain knowledge and the ability to use knowledge.The teaching ofBritish and American literatureshould change the traditional teaching mode of teacher-centered education into students-centered education;change the input teaching method to the heuristic teaching method;change the knowledge instruction to the ability enhancement.To achieve this goal,corpus stylistics can be adopted as an assistant means of teaching.With the fast development of corpus linguistics,corpus stylistics gradually came into being,which is a combination of corpus linguistics and stylistics.This is defined by Leech and Short as the“corpus turn”of stylistics(Leech & Short,2007,p.286).Since the beginning of the 21st century,more and more scholars and researchers come to emphasize the advantages of corpus in literature teaching.Corpus-assistedEnglish and American literatureteaching method is proposed(Dong,2018; Sun,2016; etc.); the necessity and possibility of this teaching mode is analyzed(Yu,2015; etc.); the basic principles of corpus-assisted teaching method is presented(Zhang,2007;etc.).However,few research has been done aimed at improving the innovation ability of English majors,assisted by corpus stylistics.In this study,the corpus stylistics assistedEnglish and American Literatureteaching mode is analyzed,from the language,theme,and writing style of the literary works.The study attempts to propose that corpus stylistics can assist the teaching ofEnglish and American literature,stimulate students’interest in learning,cultivate their academic thinking and literary accomplishment,and help improve students’innovation ability.

Corpus stylistics assisted the teaching reform of British and American literature

Preparation

To adopt the corpus stylistics assisted teaching method,teachers should do some preparation before class.Firstly,the construction of corpus should be finished.According to different teaching aims,teachers can create literature corpora of different sizes,different genres and different historical periods.Secondly,teachers should clean the texts,eliminate dryers and label them.Finally,a comparative corpus should be chosen.The fictional section in the Brown corpus or the American Contemporary English Corpus(COCA)can be used as comparative corpus.Furthermore,teachers can adopt a self-built corpus of works by other writers of a certain period as the comparative corpus.Finally,a suitable corpus analysis software is necessary.More commonly used is AntConc or WordSmith.

To Understand the Literary Language

For a long time,the understanding of relevant works in the teaching ofBritish and American literatureis mostly based on the perceptual knowledge of teachers and students.Students lack the ability of exploratory thinking.The intervention of corpus stylistics can give students more opportunities to study independently and improve their innovation ability.Bill Louw discussed delexicalisation in English language teaching and suggested that corpus stylistics could be useful for literature research and teaching(Louw & Milojkovic,2016).The phenomenon of delexicalisation is better reflected in poetry.Before class,teacher can guide the students to retrieve the keywords in poetry with AntConc,to generate the keyword list according to the Keyness Value,and then carry out analysis on the key words.

Take Shakespeare’s sonnets as an example.A keyword list has been made with AntConc(Table 1).From the keywords“l(fā)ove,beauty,sweet,praise”and so on,it is not difficult to suggest that the theme of the sonnets is to praise love.Then teachers and students can further analyze the concordance list of the keywords in AntConc,that is the“keyword in context(KWIC)”,which leads to the contextual meaning of the keywords.Take the keyword“sweet”as an example,which appears 51 times in the sonnets.The analysis on the collocation of“sweet”shows that the words modified by sweet include some positive words:love,hours,roses,etc; and some passive words:thief,leave,flattery,odour,death,etc.This suggests that in addition to the praise of love and friend’s beauty,the author blames his lover’s unfaithfulness.In the process of teaching,teachers can guide students to do some research independently,and then exchange their findings in various forms such as group discussion and presentation.Deep analysis on the use of language in literature works can not only improve the classroom learning efficiency,enhance students’interest in learning,but also enrich the teaching content,improve students’innovation ability to explore knowledge.

Table 1 Keyword list in Shakespeare’s Sonnets

To Understand the Theme

As Bill Louw and Marija Milojkovic pointed out,“In the area of literature we can expect collocation to improve our understanding of literary meaning and lead to better criticism.”(Louw & Milojkovic,2016,p.37)Professor Wei Naixing suggested that“Collocation is not only the simple juxtaposition of words,but also the reflect of the mutual expectancy between words”(Wei,2003,p.11).This is called semantic prosody by linguistics.In literature teaching,exploring the semantic prosody of words collocation can provide quantified texts data for teachers and students to further understand the theme of literature works.Taking Nabocov’s novelLolitaas an example,after analyzing the top 50 high-frequency words,it can be seen that the theme of the novel revolves around the story of a girl named Lolita and a man named Humbert in their journey.

The narrator’s attitude and points of view can be reflected through further analysis of the semantic prosody of the keyword“child”(see Figure 1).Among the modifiers of“child”,“affectionate,adorable,delightful,fascinating,lovely(6 times)”belong to the positive modifiers;“demon(2 times),dumb,impudent,mere,resentful,wayward(2 times),fragile(2 times),bruised,poor,pale,shivering,wincing,lone,slave(2 times)”are negative modifiers.The modifiers reflect that the narrator of the novel gives full praise to the appearance of“child”Lolita and expresses his love for her without any disguise.This emotion is totally different from that of a normal adult man for a child.Then it is easy to understand Humbert’s abnormal love for Lolita in the novel.But the negative modifiers depict Lolita as a evil and fragile child who is vulnerable and lonely,which makes Lolita an easy“prey”for Humbert.At the same time,Lolita is evil which gives Humbert a good excuse for his paedophilia deeds.

Figure 1 Semantic prosody in corpus of Lolita

The most intuitive information about themes and characters can be obtained through the research method of corpus stylistics.Students can study independently before class,predetermine theme and characters in advance,and deepen their understanding of literature works through close reading in class and guidance from teachers.After class,they can further retrieve key words and analyze the semantic prosody of the keywords,so as to confirm what they have learned or explore a new perspective of interpretation.

To Understand the Writing Style

The use of words and the features of sentences in the works can reveal the author’s writing style.The standardised TTR or STTR,mean word length,high frequency collocation patterns and mean in words are some of the commonly used indicators,through which the richness and complexity of the words used by the author and the characteristics of language usage can be reflected.Teachers can build small corpus for the comparative studies between two or more authors.The standardised TTR(STTR)is an indicator of lexical diversity that is not constrained by the length of the text,which makes it more credible for examining texts of different lengths or corpora of different volumes(Baker,2000).The STTR of“A Tale of Two Cities Corpus”and“The Old Man and The SeaCorpus”,is 47.3 and 34.62 respectively.This indicates that there is a higher level of vocabulary richness of the former novel.This is consistent with the colloquial style of Hemingway’s novels.

In addition to the lexical features,author’s writing style is also reflected in the syntactic structure.Teachers can guide students to use corpus stylistics as research approaches to analyze the clusters or n-grams in corpus,and explore the grammatical and semantic features of high-frequency word clusters in literature works(e.g.“Negation”word clusters,“Speech clusters”,etc.).The study of the high frequency collocation in the works can not only compare the styles of different writers,but also explore the consistence of each writer’s writing style in different periods.

Conclusion

With the development of corpus linguistics,corpus stylistics is becoming one of the main auxiliary teaching methods.The Ling-lit teaching mode combining linguistics and literature advocated by this study is not a complete substitute for close reading of literary texts and perceptual thinking of literature works,but an organic combination and mutual supplement of the two aspects.The application of corpus stylistics in the teaching ofEnglish and American literaturecan not only change the teacher-centered teaching mode,improve students’participation,but also enhance students’self-learning and scientific inquiry ability,and then improve their innovation ability.

Acknowledgements

This paper is a research finding of the project supported by the Education Research & Reform Foundation of Tianjin Agricultural University:A Study on Corpus-Aided Curriculum Construction of British and American Literature(Grant No.2018-A-08).This paper is a research finding of the project supported by Scientific Research Project of Tianjin Municipal Commission of Education：A Study on the Image of Tianjin in the Major English Newspapers in Tianjin from 1860 to 1949(Grant No.2019SK016).