This paper aims to present stylistics as a reliable method which can facilitate the teaching of literary texts in an English as a Foreign Language (henceforth, EFL) context. Before demonstrating this view by examining some texts (two poems entitled “The First Shot” and “Were You There” respectively by Chinua Achebe and Ken Saro-Wiwa, and an extract from a novel entitled Weep Not, Child by Ngugi wa Thiong’o), it first recalls how this method has been diligently applied in a Francophone university (Université André Salifou, Republic of Niger). While the analysis of the poems proves how the poets deploy language to produce stylistic effects; i.e. how they exploit resources from the five levels of language (phonology, graphology, morphology, syntax and semantics) to encode meaning, that of the extract illustrates how the narrator uses language (transitivity features, to be precise) to depict the characters and encode a given point of view therein. The study actually provides two stylistic analysis worksheets (one for the levels of language and one for transitivity) which guide the EFL learner on how to conduct his/her stylistic analysis and interpretation. It concludes with an outline of some pedagogical implications of the use of stylistics in an EFL setting.
Ayodele Adebayo Allagbé (Wed,) studied this question.