Investigating EFL Learners’ Ability to Analyse Poetic Language: A Pedagogical Corpus Stylistic Approach

Abstract

Pedagogical stylistics refers to the application of the tools of stylistics in the teaching of the English language as a foreign or a second language. Teaching and learning poetry is challenging. Thus, pedagogical corpus stylistics (Henceforth, PCS) approach has been introduced to Iraqi undergraduate foreign language learners (EFL) to guide them to analyze poetic language. The study aims to make students interact with authentic examples of poetic language and answer questions about it. The main objective of the study is to examine whether PCS tools enable the learners to provide linguistic evidence from the poetic texts they are exposed to. This in turn ensures objective poetic analyses. Moreover, it aims to enable EFL Iraqi students to discover salient norms related to the Standard English language. The study reveals that the pedagogical corpus stylistic approach helps the students to discover language patterns using corpus tools with the help of the teacher’s guidance at the beginning but this eventually leads to independent learning and discoveries about poetic language.