Using appraisal to support students’ inquiry into literature

This study centres around an analysis of appraisal resources in the poem “Three Friends of Mine” by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. This analysis illustrates appraisal’s capacity to illuminate how individual language choices in the poem constitute a fabric of meaning ( Peng 2008 ) wherein each impacts the other, as in Hood’s (2019) description of prosody; how appraisal focuses readers on the emotions and associations of the poem’s speaker as opposed to their own, which is crucial for successful interpretation; and how appraisal reveals that vibe is impacted not only by the prosody and inscribed meanings, but also by meanings evoked through the discourses that appraisal resources are deployed to embrace or reject. Implications for disciplinary literacy teaching are discussed.