A textured and sensory grammar for the experience of reading

This paper explores the application of texture and textual attractors within a cognitive stylistic pedagogy for English teachers. Texture, defined as the feeling of building and experiencing a fictional world, is here taken up as a facilitative way of thinking about how reading, language, experience and cognition operate in the classroom. On the basis of data generated from a three-year, classroom-based, collaborative research project in the UK, I discuss how teachers and students drew on and used these cognitive stylistic concepts in their explorations of a literary text. I show how classroom discourse reveals ways in which teachers and students drew benefits from the pedagogy in a variety of ways: through conceptual interpretations of grammatical form; by allowing readers to describe their reading experiences in systematic ways, and by working with a spatially, sensory and experientially orientated grammar which is built on what readers already know about the world.