Cognitive appeal as a criterion in the choice of teaching materials

• Authors: Karolina Janczukowicz
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

he paper presents an attempt to provide a criterion for potentially useful materials in second-language teaching. That criterion is “cognitive appeal”, a notion introduced by Ryszard Wenzel in The Education of a Language Teacher, characterising those texts that are attractive for students because of a chance to expand their cognitive structures or owing to an artistic experience. The presence or absence of this feature is analysed on three texts and lessons conducted with their use. The texts are Robert Frost’s “Stopping by woods on a snowy evening”, Alan Seeger’s “I Have a Rendezvous with Death” and Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven”. The conclusion of the discussion is that, for a poem to be potentially good teaching material, it should not only provide an opportunity for artistic experience and in this way bear the feature of cognitive appeal but its lexical and structural content should be well adopted to suit the level of English that learners represent.

Keywords

EN

cognitive appeal; cognitive structure; lexical content; structural content

• Publisher: Uniwersytet Gdański
• Journal: Beyond Philology: An International Journal of Linguistics, Literary Studies and English Language Teaching
• Year: 2011
• Issue: 8
• Pages: 155-166

Contributors

author

Karolina Janczukowicz

• Instytut Anglistyki i Amerykanistyki, Uniwersytet Gdański

References

• Frost, Robert (1966). A Pocketbook of Robert Frost’s Poems. New York: Washington Square Press, Inc.
• Poe, Edgar Allan (1956). The Raven. Boston: Museum of Fine Arts.
• Rychło, Mikołaj (2004). “The potential of cognitive appeal for achieving authenticity in language use”. Beyond Philology 3: 261-272.
• Rychło, Mikołaj (2008). The Educational Approach to Language Teaching. Warszawa: PWN.
• Seeger, Alan, Amanda Harlech, Karl Lagerfeld (2001). Alan Seeger: The Complete Works. The California University.
• Wenzel, Ryszard (2001). The Education of a Language Teacher. Gdańsk: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Gdańskiego.

Identifiers

ISSN

1732-1220