A Certain Colouring of Imagination: Turning the Familiar into Ironical

Some writers are very good at turning familiar landscapes into different places we still feel we could belong to. They use irony – and they aimat the background we share. How do we learn to single out irony? How do we teach irony to our students, making them recognize it between the lines of a written text? Systemic Functional Linguistics and Critical Discourse Analysis of unabridged stories written for English native speakers can provide a considerable amount of data we can compare and relate to the socio-cultural values/conventions of different countries. The reading and analysis we carried out during our courses fostered reflection on language-culture relationship, while reinforcing the use of language in reading and discussing a literary text in the classroom.