Teaching Free Indirect Discourse to Literature/Linguistics Majors

概要

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Although free indirect speech/thought (FIS/FIT) has been of great interest to linguists as a means of presenting protagonists' discourse, they have rarely been discussed in classes in universities. This might be due to the fact that these two forms are characterized in terms of the mixture of a protagonist's and the narrator's voices and the decision to make an FIS/FIT reading mainly depends on the contexts in which that decision occurs rather than their syntactic features. The ability to recognize these modes, however, greatly helps students to understand both fictional and non-fictional narratives and provides analytical tools for processing them. This paper recommends teaching FIS and FIT to literature/linguistics majors so that they could first recognise the free indirect mode in texts and then explain the effects of these forms relating them to the context and text-type in which they occur. By analysing the students' performances qualitatively, the study reviews difficulties the students had in identifying FIS and FIT and makes pedagogical suggestions.
2010-03-30