A Linguistic Approach

How then should we go about learning to read and write better?

When the going gets tough, our first recourse is to do everything we did before, but more deliberately. We reread words
and read aloud to make sense of the remarks, trying to recreate the verbal pauses that might give clues to the structure
of sentences. But reading better involves more than simply trying harder. and translating the written into the spoken
word. Looking closer, alone, won’t do the trick. "Just do it!" won't suffice. You can stare at a car engine all day and come
away with no understanding of why your car runs—or doesn’t run! It doesn’t help for someone to tell you to work more
carefully when you are not aware of what you’re doing.

If we think about it, we have been told a lot in general about how to approach reading a text, and surprisingly little
about how exactly to find meaning in a text. We are asked to summarize, question, and reread, but these are all simply
study behaviors. They do not tell us how to question, what to look for when we read, or how to find the meaning to
summarize.

What should we look for, then, when we read? How are ideas conveyed in writing? And how do readers draw meaning
from the written page?

The concepts and terminology presented in these web pages will enable you to see how the language works to
communicate ideas in written form. They will show you ways in which thoughts can be linked within a discussion, both in
terms of connections from sentence to sentence and in terms of relationships between ideas and sections of a
discussion. They show , for instance, how language (unlike, say, numbers) enables continuous levels of qualification, and
how this aspect of language enables us to focus our thoughts. We shall see how new ideas are generated from the
relationships of other ideas and that we read and write ideas, rather than merely words.

For a broader view of how meaning is conveyed by text, these pages focus on an examination of the choices open to a
writer in forming a text: choices of content, language and structure. Choices are examined not only within the view of
writing as a sequential activity, one sentence after another, but also in a more holistic or organic way in terms of a mix of
ingredients or intertwining patterns of elements throughout a text.
The paper deals with language studies in the literature classroom at linguistics faculties. Research into the language
exponents of the literary text’s content and structure, such as its socially and culturally conditioned lexis, as well as its
communicative types is usually left beyond the scope of literary analysis. The objective of this paper is to prove that the
study of the literary text’s content should go hand in hand with the study of its language. The research conducted by the
authors of the paper proves that the integral approach to the study of the literary text is optimal for the purpose.

The integral approach in linguistics is defined as an approach which combines different perspectives of one and the
same object of research to give its global, multiaspective, and comprehensive interpretation, with all the elements of
the integral approach being not a mere sum total but sharing a common core which helps uncover their interrelation
and interdependence in exploring and explaining the research object. Thus, from the integral perspective, a literary text
is an integral dispersed object, a unity of four fragments: a fragment of knowledge, a fragment of national culture, a
fragment of language and a fragment of social space which are verbalized in their global interrelation and
interconnection.

We have applied this approach to the study of a university novel in the literature classroom with students who major in
linguistics. A university novel is a type of discourse that reflects cognitive, social and cultural reality in a university
context. To prove that language studies should be part and parcel of literature studies a survey among students of
linguistics who are currently taking a course in British and American literature was conducted. The results of this survey
revealed the neglected linguistic exponents of the university novel’s cognitive, cultural and social space that need
attention. These include:

• Lexical exponents of students' and professors' discourse;

• Syntax of the characters' discourse;

• Pragmatics of the discourse;

• Topical content;

• Culturally conditioned stylistic exponents of characters' discourse.

The abovementioned linguistic exponents were thoroughly attended to in the course of literature studies of the
university novel “The Secret History” by Donna Tartt. The evaluation of the results obtained against the results of the
traditional approach proved that applying an integral approach to teaching literature at linguistics faculties is productive
as it covers all the aspects of the literary text (cognitive, social, cultural and linguistic ones), thus giving the students who
major in linguistics an opportunity to assess not only the literary, cultural and social features of the text studied, but
their linguistic exponents and the language itself.