Granular flows composed of non-spherical particles are encountered in a number of applications, ranging from industry to geophysics. Reliable mathematical models of flows of particles with complicated shape would permit, e.g., to increase the efficiency and decrease the energy required for handling and transporting granular materials in industrial apparati. Discrete modelling of granular flows composed of spheres have been around for a long time and are now able to deal with a number of complicated effects such as aggregation, breakage, cohesion and poly-dispersity. Continuum models that extend the seminal works on kinetic theory of granular gases to account for strong inelasticity, friction, velocity correlation, finite stiffness and presence of rate-independent components of the stresses can now satisfactorily reproduce the flows of rigid and soft spheres in a number of geometrical configurations. In the last decade, discrete element simulations of shearing flows of true cylinders and sphero-cylinders have also been carried out. These simulations confirmed the experimental observation that non-spherical particles, in which the ratio of major-to-minor axis is sufficiently far from one, develop a preferential alignment. This has a number of consequences on the constitutive relations to be adopted in continuum models. In particular, it means that at least the mean orientation angle should be treated as an additional state variable, while phrasing the associated evolution equation. It has been shown that kinetic theory of granular gases is capable of predicting stresses and velocity fluctuations in homogeneous shearing flows of frictionless cylinders in a range of length-to-diameter (aspect) ratio and solid volume fraction, at least if preferential alignment is not dominant. Here, we extend kinetic theory of granular gases to deal with particles that can manifest significant preferential orientation in response to shearing. This is done by incorporating the crucial role of particle velocity fluctuations in existing, continuum balance equations derived for liquid crystals.