Abstract:
Stylistics is an essential linguistic approach and is often considered a sub-branch of Applied Linguistics. This paper aims to investigate the poem at four distinct linguistic levels of stylistic analysis: graphological, lexical, morphological and syntactical. The poem 'Breakfast' by Jacques Pervert was selected for this study as it is one of the important poems in the curriculum of the GCE (O//L) literature in Sri Lankan secondary education. ESL learners and teachers think that understanding poems is challenging and are reluctant to learn and teach in the classroom as a regular activity. Analyzing the text stylistically in linguistic layers, the readers grasp the relevant information from each aspect to increase their comprehension and the faculty of interpreting poems. The study is significant in analyzing a framework of the author's writing style for easy comprehension for the readers. The collected data were analyzed with the application of mixed methods. Leech and Short's heuristic checklist of linguistic and stylistic models was used. The findings reveal that identifying the insights of the writer's language style, structure, theme, and the poet's intention and attitude. Further, the study addresses that text analysis helps ESL learners interpret the text's meaning, explain the content structure, and analyze the style at the communicative or discourse, lexical, textual and morphosyntactic levels. Stylistics is closely related to linguistic and literary criticism, which examines how language and the meanings of texts are communicated. Therefore, analyzing the poems at various linguistic levels gives the learners linguistic expertise and a better understanding of the poem.
