Improving Sociolinguistic Competence (SC) through Feminist Stylistics (FS)
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Date
2018-02
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Asian Journal of African Studies
Abstract
Feminist stylistics (FS), like any other stylistics practice, draws basic
assumptions from linguistics. Yet unlike other traditional stylistics practices,
FS opens its doors to ideology and extra-textual factors in the analysis of a
text. Unlike the formalist stylistics, for example, it renders less importance
to linguistic form and linguistic elegance. Drawing relevant linguistic tools
like passivisation, transitivity, agency and fragmentation from functional
stylistics, FS can be applied to analyse power structures. In line with these
assumptions, the ultimate aim of this research was to study the significance
of FS in enhancing the sociolinguistic competence (SC) of students through
teaching local poetry in English in the Ethiopian higher education context.
A feminist stylistics model of teaching poetry was integrated with
communicative language teaching (CLT) tasks so that an intriguing
environment was recreated in the classroom for the students to develop their
sociolinguistic competence. This project was an integral part of five other
stylistics research projects. It was carried out on the basis of an
experimental research design following a mixed method research. A total of
190 students (63.3%) were selected from the population of 300 students in
various programmes of the Department of English and Other Languages at
Adama University, Ethiopia, through a systematic sampling procedure.
These students were again classified into experimental groups (95) and control groups (95) following a systematic sampling method. The students
in the experimental group took FS module through the stylistics course
which included FS and other modules in stylistics. A summary of the total
mean gain score out of 20 showed an interesting result. Both the control and
experimental groups performed almost similarly in their feminist stylistics
pre-test which was calculated out of 20%. The experimental mean score was
9.8842 and a little bigger than the control mean score of 7.2316.
Consequently, the t-test result showed that the existence of a mean
difference of 1.33684 was not statistically significant. Therefore, there
was no statistically significant difference between the mean test scores of
the two groups. On the other hand, the t-test results for both pre and post
tests for the feminist stylistics module were also observed. The t-value of
the feminist stylistics post-test was 8.651. And, the table value of t-critical
was 1.96 with 188 degree of freedom and at a significance level of 0.05.
Because the t-value of 8.651 exceeded the t-critical value of 1.96 for a two
tailed test at 0.05 level of significance for 188 degree of freedom, the null
hypothesis was rejected. Therefore, the feminist stylistic method of teaching
indigenous poetry does contribute to the improvement of the sociolinguistic
competence of students in the English as a foreign language (EFL) context.
Description
* Associate Professor/Deputy Director, Department of Communication, Faculty of
Human Sciences, Namibia University of Science and Technology, Windhoek,
Namibia; email: hwoldemariam@nust.na
Keywords
Feminist stylistics (FS), Sociolinguistic competence (SC), Indigenous poetry, EFL, Communicative language teaching (CLT), Gender free language
Citation
Woldemariam, H. Z. (2018). Improving Sociolinguistic Competence (SC) through Feminist Stylistics (FS). Asian Journal of African Studies, (43), 31-81.