In Chapter 4, we examine how perspective taking has been conceptualized in literary studies and elements of writing style affect perspective taking by the reader. We begin with an analysis of concepts commonly associated with perspective taking, including identification and transportation. In our analysis of the effect of the text on perspective taking, we distinguish two classes of features: First-order features are those that have often been assumed to produce perspective taking, such as the use of personal pronouns, providing mental access to a character, and the use of free-indirect speech. We conclude that there is little clear evidence for a simple causal relation between such features and perspective taking by the reader. Second-order features are those that, we argue, lead to elaborative processing by the reader and thus lay the foundation for perspective-taking analogies. Such features include showing versus telling styles, textual gaps, embodied descriptions, and foregrounding. We conclude the chapter with a discussion of the role of the narrator and the relation between the reader and the character.

In Chapter 6, we elaborate on the difficulties that may arise in perspective taking. These depend on individual, contextual, and textual variables. Among the individual factors are motivation, cognitive skills and capacities, and empathic dispositions. Variations in the situation and context, such as available information and feedback, can affect perspective taking. Specific difficulties include: the failure to identify relevant personal knowledge and experience, inconsistent and conflicting perspectives, problems reconciling a character’s perspective with the reader’s own evaluations, and/or the relationship of the reader’s cultural background to that of the character. Subtleties in the text, such as multiple perspectives, unreliable perspectives, and multiple perspective-taking targets, pose their own challenges.

The main message of this chapter is that vocabulary teaching has only a limited role to play in the learning of vocabulary (no more than one-quarter of one of the four strands of a course), and teachers need to be careful not to overplay this role at the expense of the time available for the deliberate learning and incidental learning of vocabulary. In this chapter, the role of teaching is very narrowly defined, and it is used to refer to the teacher deliberately teaching vocabulary. The conditions needed for vocabulary learning are carefully examined and two approaches to evaluating vocabulary teaching activities, involvement load and technique feature analysis, are described and applied. The chapter includes a range of practical activities for teaching words, including concordancing and computer-assisted vocabulary learning. These different activities are related to the various aspects of knowing a word.

Chapter 5 turns to cognitive depth, another aspect of our thinking that is regularly reflected in the way we formulate our thoughts. On the one hand, we can think things through, and formulate them in language, in much detail, or we can remain on the surface, sticking to the mere essentials. A focus on granularity patterns in linguistic analysis therefore provides insights into the speaker’s conceptualisations relative to a situation context, aspects attended to in depth, and diversity between individuals and types of situations. On the other hand, we can be more or less certain about what we describe, reflecting our expertise or the uncertainty of the subject matter itself. Variability in certainty adds a dimension of reliability to the speaker’s contribution, which is decisive for assessing the status of relevant concepts. Both aspects, granularity and certainty, work together, as experts will often be able to look into things in much more depth than novices – but on the other hand they don’t always need to, as they quickly recognise patterns that they’ve come across before.