A pedagogical stylistic evaluation of literature studies at Onawa Senior Secondary School, Omusati Region

Abstract

This study examined the difficulties, importance, and methods of pedagogical stylistics in literature teaching and learning. The goals of this study were to assess the linguistic difficulties that arise when learning literature in an ESL environment, to determine the linguistic significance of literature in an ESL context, and to evaluate the linguistic approaches that can be used to address some of the difficult linguistic issues encountered when learning ESL literature at the senior secondary level in Namibia. Data collection techniques that were qualitative and quantitative were employed. The interpretative paradigm served as the study's intellectual foundation because it used the pragmatic technique as its methodology. To further emphasise their significance in teaching and learning through pedagogical stylistics, the study was supported by a variety of techniques for the analysis and interpretation of the data that were gathered. The investigation was conducted in the Omusati region at a secondary school. At Onawa Secondary School, the study's sample included 950 students and 5 ESL instructors. The individuals were purposefully chosen via random convenient sampling. Four teachers who were in charge of instructing literary studies to students in grades 10 through 12 at Onawa Secondary School made up the sample sizes for this study. Using a simple random sampling approach, 30 students (from Grades 10, 11, and 12) were selected for sampling. Teachers were interviewed using the interview guide and students who received the test item as questionnaires were given to collect data, and selected texts used for analysis were also used. After coding the data, the researcher searched for overarching concepts that manifested themes, tables, and patterns. According to the objectives, the data's findings show that there is not a cohesive approach to teaching and studying literature at all. For teaching literature prescribed texts that are not matched to any style forms, L2 teachers lack some pedagogical stylistics skills. Although there is evidence that literature is important for students' linguistic and academic development, literal texts are presented in a way that is not consistent with pedagogical, semantic, pragmatic, feminist, or other literal device approaches. In essence, the study finds that the significance of literal text selections to types of stylistic approaches of analysis—which L2 teachers are intended to reinforce during teaching and learning of literature texts chosen—were misaligned in the curriculum and syllabus. As a result, the curriculum was created without the most helpful suggestions from ESL teachers. Furthermore, neither the curriculum nor the scheme of work specifies the genres to be emphasised in literary studies, and some genre writings are not officially permitted or included in the language policy.