The Effectiveness of Text World Theory Approach in Analyzing Literary Texts in the EFL Classroom

Abstract

In response to the perceived pedagogical demand of modern teaching, EFL teachers are constantly looking for efficacious and student-centered methods to bring about to their classrooms. In today’s educational world, pedagogical stylistics grows in influence and occupies a central position. Educationists and practitioners dedicate a big body of research to it thanks to its potency in the field of education. It is opted for as it enables learners to taste literary works in a more systematic way by allying language and literature. Pedagogical stylistics draws its raw material from the wide range of linguistic models, analytical techniques and methodologies, and applies them in analyzing texts and discourse. Stylistic analysis is thus the actual realization of theoretical linguistics as it primarily considers the linguistic patterns and the formal features of a given text. The present paper sheds light on one of the models of analyzing literary texts within the scope of pedagogical stylistics that is the Text World Theory (the TWT henceforth). The latter is a language-based approach that positions students at the core of text in order to unravel its underlying meaning. The aim of the current study is to investigate the usefulness of the TWT in the EFL classroom as an approach to intensify students’ centeredness and as an effective aid to analyze the literary text.