Spiral approach to text awareness

Abstract

The present paper confronts the widely spread pedagogical tendency to approach Literature directly from the ideological load of the texts mostly mediated by the teacher’s or literary critic’s interpretation. We argue that such tendency is, in fact, a visible product of the Folk perspective that has pervaded our literature courses in Spain. We propose here a change of focus from this traditional approach to a new one in the theoretical framework of Cognitive Science. We introduce an innovative seven step procedure to guide reflexive reading by applying tools provided by Cognitive Linguistics such as ‘Conceptual Metaphor Theory’, which focuses attention on the dynamic processes of linguistic constructions and semantic construal derived from texts lexicalizations. The text becomes an open field of discoveries not restricted by a superficial interpretation, but open to talk through its linguistic-conceptual constructions. The procedure is mostly based upon observation and seminal work applied in Literature undergraduate courses in the last stage of the fouryear BA degree in English Studies throughout my teaching practicum with Professor Juani Guerra offered by the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain.