What is it about?

The technological revolution of the 21st century has opened limitless possibilities in learning languages and literature (van Peer et al. 2010; van Peer et al. 2011). In addition to other influences, in universities around the world, educators are witnessing appearance of the “Net Generation” (Baron & Maier 2005), or “digital natives” (Prensky 2001). They have been showing educators that the academic world has also changed, and that at least the elements of a new way of learning, “e-ducation” (E-ducation 2013), must find their way into the curriculum as technology is likely to influence how learners read per se and react to literary texts in particular. This chapter aims to present a case study, examining how Ukrainian EFL students respond to a canonical piece of poetry – in a conventional academic setting or online – and empirically testing whether their reaction depends on the form and the format of exposure. It outlines the project in which five groups (135 participants), read Dickinson’s “A slash of Blue” (Dickinson 1961: 95) and after that reported their response to the verse. Groups 1–3 read the poem during their classes, whereas Group 4 did it as a Facebook survey. Group 5 listened to the text, professionally read on YouTube. In the chapter, the experiment procedure is detailed, and the results, revealing differences between the responses of the groups, reported. The findings point out that readers’ responses to poetry do depend on how and where learners are exposed to the text, and this offers empirical evidence for some of the technological and contextual implications involved in literary reading.

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Why is it important?

The findings need to be taken into account when working on the 21st century university curricula and building efficient strategies to facilitate EFL students mastery of the foreign language as well as foreign literature appreciation.

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This page is a summary of: Chapter 6. Empirical stylistics in an EFL teaching context, June 2016, John Benjamins,
DOI: 10.1075/lal.24.06che.
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