Here's a rubric I use to a) turn literature teachers into 'linguists' so that b) they can then teach students the

linguistic terms they need for this new lang-lit course. And just before I launch into it... I did a literature degree many many years ago and I confess that I've recently had to relearn what I once knew about the history of the English language (from Old to Middle to Modern etc.) which I'm looking at for Part 1 (language change). For me this new course is a wonderful opportunity to clean the dust off long discarded areas of knowledge as well as to acquire new ones. I suppose we're all like that... it's one of the reasons we're teachers...:-) Many of the activities below were created by a wonderful teacher called Jane Bluett who shared them with me at a NATE conference about 12 years ago. The rubric is based on the following eight linguistic 'tools'. 1. Graphology 2. Grammar 3. Syntax 4. Morphology 5. Phonology 6. Lexis 7. Semantics 8. Pragmatics Step 1 Ask the students to write the first letter of their first name on a piece of paper. They can write it anyway they like. Some will write it big. Some will write it small. Some upper case, some lower case. This is a good way of showing what Graphology is. It's 'the marks on the page'. If you can get hold of the screenplay for Trainspotting, you can demonstrate this further. On the first page of the screenplay, the word CHOICE is written in larger and larger font as you realise how limited the narrator's choices actually are. Different coloured letters come under Graphology (as can punctuation) so you can, for example, compare headlines in tabloids and quality papers, or look at the labels on those plastic bottles of water with special tops designed for runners...the different colours are there for a very good reason... also includes all visual images. For this new course... this is all you really need to know. Teach students to say things like "This text is full of interesting graphological features such as the use of the Coca Cola font in order to subvert the company's activities" (or whatever). Step 2 Ask the students to write down a noun, an adjective, a verb and an adverb beginning with the first letter of their first name. In my case: vegan, vote, voracious, vicariously. This is Grammar (part of speech, tenses, pronouns...you name it). Useful for Literature as well as Language study (the repeated 'his' pronoun in Chap. 3 of The Great Gatsby, sudden tense changes etc.) Step 3 Ask the students to make a sentence out of their four words. The voracious vegan voted vicariously.

Here you are demonstrating syntax. The above is a statement. The order of the words tells us this. It is not a question. Nor is it an incomplete sentence. It is a statement. Students might identify long involved sentences suddenly contrasting with a short sentence or they might identify characters that ask lots of questions or they might identify archaic syntax... Step 4 Ask the students what they have done to their words to make the words into a grammatical sentence. They have used morphemes. They have added -d to 'vote' to indicate the simple past and they have added -ly to 'voracious' to make it into an adverb. Morphemes are the smallest units of meaning. A good way to explain this is to write the following on the board. This is Jane Bluett at her most brilliant and wonderful :-) The glorpish gloops glorped glarpishly. None of the above words exist, yet thanks to the morphemes, they do have meaning. For example, if you ask the students how many gloops there were, they can tell you there was more than one gloop because the morpheme -s tells us this. If you ask them what the gloops were doing, they can tell you that the gloops were glorping because the -ed morpheme tells us that glorped is a verb in the past. If you ask them HOW the gloops were glorping, they can tell you that the gloops were glorping glarpishly thanks to the -ly morpheme. Step 5 Ask the students to read out their sentences. The voracious vegan voted vicariously. This is phonology (more specifically alliteration). You may or may not choose to go into the whole sibilance, assonance shabang at this point :-) Step 6 Ask the students to draw a flower. The word 'flower' is an item of lexis. It is an item of lexis that most people are familiar with. And yet each student will have drawn a different flower. Some will have 5 petals,, others more, others less. Some will have a stalk with leaves, others not. This is Semantics (the meaning which each individual attaches to a word). I like to explain the difference between Lexis (with an x) and Semantics (with n,t and s) by drawing a box. The boX (leXis) has the label FLOWER on it but inside the box, the contents (Semantics) could be anything...any of the various flowers that your students have drawn. Semantics is what part 3 is about (and indeed the whole course). I'm thinking of the individual meaning that readers give the word Nigger when they read Huck Finn for example. Step 7 Give the students a copy of the speech that Earl Spencer, the brother of Diana, Princess of Wales, gave at her funeral. Ask them to highlight all the lexical items to do with 'woman'. There are many. You could, at this point, explore the semantic implications of these words (nurse, goddess etc. ... we all have our own personal appreciations of these words ... our own personal contents of the box labelled 'Nurse' or 'Goddess'). Then ask the students to identify a crucial item of lexis which is missing from the speech (it is 'Wife'). This is a good way of

demonstrating Pragmatics i.e. the agenda of the author. Earl Spencer excluded the word 'Wife' very deliberately. You can find the text of the speech here: http://www.americanrhetoric.co...pencerdianaeulogy.htm You might also care to refer back to morphology here with the little bits of the word eulogy... Pragmatics is what this new course is all about... what the author is trying to do to your head. Ads from Amnesty International or Oxfam or Friends of the Earth can be very useful for demonstrating Pragmatics. Students can easily identify the pragmatics of the text (the agenda of its writers). They can see how authors use syntax and lexis and graphology to get their agendas across (like the healthy blue letters on the label of the water bottle). They can see how an -ing morpheme is repeated to emphasise the immediacy of something; how question syntax is repeated to provoke an emotional reaction (Have you ever wondered where your next meal is coming from? Have you ever had to drink dirty water? Have you ever had to walk ten miles to get food?); they can see how phonology is used to make a sentence alliteratively or assonantally memorable; they can see how grammar (a repeated possessive pronoun like 'his' in The Great Gatsby - used repeatedly to emphasise Gatsby's material wealth - or a sudden change from the past to the present tense to increase suspense) creates meaning. And yes this rubric overlaps with others... I have a rubric for rhetorical devices and for literature terms and for poetry... I use this list of linguistic tools as a checklist. I find that literature-phobic students (the kind who always claim they 'don't know what to say about a text') can appreciate being able to analyse texts in this rather technical fashion. It can empower them to provide their own informed personal response to texts. Hopefully this can be of use. Go through it yourself and then you can do it with your students... and forget about bloody praxis and deixis... these terms are all you need and may they be used in as straightforward a way as possible. Linguistics should be demystified and democratised as much as literature should!!!