‘Pedagogical Stylistics’ through Corpora in the University Classroom: A Case-Study

How can corpus linguistics be used for pedagogical purposes? How can it contribute to the study and appreciation of specific literary aspects? The aim of this paper is to show how students can become researchers, and use authentic language data to discover tendencies and thematic trends through inductive procedures: in other words, how awareness/consciousness can be triggered in a practical way, without being overtly deductive. To start with, some activities that were carried out in the language classroom are described: these include the introduction of crucial corpus methods such as keyness, collocations and concordances, followed by their application to a specific case-study, the novel Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen. These activities proved very useful to raise the students’ awareness regarding the use of particular language patterns by the English author. After that, the steps of a specific ‘methodological journey’ carried out by a student in her BA dissertation are presented: here, Austen’s novel has been compared to the rest of her literary production first, and to a reference corpus composed by a sample of English literature (the Imaginative Writing Section of the British National Corpus) later. Overall, the activities described show that corpus methods can prove successful both for testing previously-formed assumptions about specific aspects of literature, and for improving language skills more generally.