STUDENT OBJECTIVES
Students will• Develop an understanding of the structure of a poem (i.e. consider the title; understand punctuation, line breaks, stanzas, enjambment, syntax)
• Develop deeper comprehension skills by doing a close reading of a poem
• Develop critical thinking skills, understanding how an author’s purpose differs for different texts, by contrasting poetry and prose
• Understand that reading poetry requires a different stance and set of reading strategies
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SESSION 1: WHAT IS POETRY?
1. Ask students to quick-write for five minutes in response to the prompt “What is poetry?” Instruct them to brainstorm any words, phrases, feelings, or associations that come to mind when thinking about poetry.
2. Provide time (15-20 minutes) for discussion, recording students’ responses on chart paper. After completing the lesson, students will have a chance to revisit and revise these responses.
Note: Many students will have misconceptions about what poetry is. They often associate poetry only with feelings, believe poetry holds hidden meaning evident only to experts, and assume that poems always rhyme.
3. Remind students that different types of texts need to be approached with different expectations and strategies. Share an example they would be familiar with, such as reading a newspaper article versus reading a novel. Point out that the purposes for reading these texts are different, and therefore, we adjust our reading speed and strategies.
o For example, when reading a newspaper, we scan the headlines for articles of interest and then skim for the main ideas. We may not read every word, but we are still able to get the gist of the article.
o On the other hand, when reading a work of fiction for school, we read more critically—asking questions, looking for patterns, rereading for understanding, and marking the text.
4. Explain that poetry also requires a close reading. In addition, although we use many of the same strategies required when reading any text (i.e. previewing the text, visualizing, setting a purpose, asking questions), reading poetry requires new strategies and expectations. These will become apparent during this lesson and subsequent lessons.
5. Project the poem “Unfolding Bud” by Naoshi Koriyama. Ask students to consider the title of the poem and make predictions about its content. (Students will likely predict it is a poem about flowers.) Tell them to follow along as you read it aloud to model how to read a poem with attention to punctuation and line breaks.
6. Using your prepared questions, lead a discussion about the poem that helps students uncover the main idea. It is unlikely that students will “get” the poem upon first reading, but emphasize that this demonstrates the first crucial lesson about reading poetry: Most poetry requires several close, word-for-word readings and deep analysis to unlock meaning.
7. Tell students they will be spending the next couple sessions exploring the concept of poetry as they look closely at a poem and an informational text on the same subject. Explain that they will work in groups to compare the two texts and draw some conclusions about the genre of poetry.
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SESSION 2: CLOSE READING OF A TEXT
1. Distribute copies of the poem “The Eagle” by Lord Alfred Tennyson. Activate students’ prior knowledge and prior experience by asking if anyone has ever seen an eagle in the wild. Some students may share stories of seeing eagles, but most probably have little or no experience with eagles in the wild.
2. Distribute copies of the TP-CASST Poetry Analysis handout and explain that it is one of many useful strategies for understanding poetry. Read the poem aloud, and work through the process with students, explaining each step. Ask students for their input, using the following questions to elicit deeper responses.
o What is the situation? Who is the speaker?
o Where is the eagle?
o Where is the speaker in relation to the eagle?
o How do you know the eagle is far away?
o How does the poem shift in the second stanza?
3. Discuss why the poet may have written this poem. (I always share my own experiences living on a lake and observing eagles diving for fish. It is a most awe-inspiring sight, worthy of a poem.) This discussion of a specific poem should lead to a more general discussion of what poetry is about.
4. Introduce the informational article "Eagles" from PBS Nature. Remind students that informational texts demand a different stance from readers. Students will likely already understand the purpose and structure of informational texts, having had more experience with them in school.
5. Distribute copies of the text (or have students access it online) and preview the text. Distribute the Four-Column Chart and explain that you have chosen this organizer because there are four paragraphs in the article. Read the article aloud to the class. Using an LCD projector, overhead projector, or interactive whiteboard, assist the students in completing the organizer. Label each column (with the main idea in the paragraph), and add details below each heading.
6. Instruct students to bring all of the printouts from this session to class for the next session to begin group work.
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SESSION 3: CONTRASTING POETRY AND PROSE
Note: Set up the classroom for this session by preparing work areas for groups of three to four students with chart paper and copies of the handout What is Poetry? Contrasting Prose and Poetry. Each group should have access to a computer and the interactive Venn Diagram.
1. As a class, review the printout What is Poetry? Contrasting Prose and Poetry, which describes the process for group work for this assignment. Allow students to spend the rest of the session discussing the guiding questions and then completing and printing the Venn Diagram.
2. Move from group to group to offer clarification of questions and expectations, ask follow-up questions, and extend students’ thinking.
3. Remind students to bring their completed Venn diagrams to the next session.
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SESSION 4: CHARACTERISTICS OF POETRY
1. Have students return to their groups and explain that they are going to work together to draw some conclusions about how poetry differs from prose. Encourage them to review both their Venn Diagrams and the guiding questions on the handout What is Poetry? Contrasting Prose and Poetry.
2. Instruct the groups to develop at least five statements about the characteristics of poetry based on their discussion. One student in each group will record the statements on chart paper, and each group will share with the whole class.
3. After all groups have reported, lead a whole-class discussion about their insights into the structure and purpose of poetry.
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EXTENSIONS
It is important to follow up this introduction to poetry with additional exploration, for example
• Poetry Browse: Provide volumes of poetry in the classroom for students to browse through and enjoy. You might also provide a form for students to record favorite poems and their responses to poems.
• Favorite Poem: Ask students to bring in and read aloud a favorite poem (include song lyrics if age-appropriate).
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STUDENT ASSESSMENT/REFLECTIONS
• Review the five statements about the characteristics of poetry generated by each group and help clear up any misconceptions students may have. These misconceptions can be addressed in the small groups, but should also later be revisited in a whole-group discussion. Return to the texts and guiding questions if students need further clarification.
• Conclude the lesson by having students quick-write again to the prompt What is poetry? Collect these responses and compare to their initial responses. Has their understanding of poetry changed and expanded?
Why teaching poetry is so important
16 years after enjoying a high school literary education rich in poetry, I am a literature teacher who barely teaches it. So far this year, my 12th grade literature students have read nearly 200,000 words for my class. Poems have accounted for no more than 100.
This is a shame—not just because poetry is important to teach, but also because poetry is important for the teaching of writing and reading.
High school poetry suffers from an image problem. Think of Dead Poet’s Society's scenes of red-cheeked lads standing on desks and reciting verse, or of dowdy Dickinson imitators mooning on park benches, filling up journals with noxious chapbook fodder. There’s also the tired lessons about iambic pentameter and teachers wringing interpretations from cryptic stanzas, their students bewildered and chuckling. Reading poetry is impractical, even frivolous. High school poets are antisocial and effete.
I have always rejected these clichéd mischaracterizations born of ignorance, bad movies, and uninspired teaching. Yet I haven’t been stirred to fill my lessons with Pound and Eliot as my 11th grade teacher did. I loved poetry in high school. I wrote it. I read it. Today, I slip scripture into an analysis of The Day of the Locust. A Nikki Giovanni piece appears in The Bluest Eye unit. Poetry has become an afterthought, a supplement, not something to study on its own.
In an education landscape that dramatically deemphasizes creative expression in favor of expository writing and prioritizes the analysis of non-literary texts, high school literature teachers have to negotiate between their preferences and the way the wind is blowing. That sometimes means sacrifice, and poetry is often the first head to roll.
Yet poetry enables teachers to teach their students how to write, read, and understand any text. Poetry can give students a healthy outlet for surging emotions. Reading original poetry aloud in class can foster trust and empathy in the classroom community, while also emphasizing speaking and listening skills that are often neglected in high school literature classes.
Students who don’t like writing essays may like poetry, with its dearth of fixed rules and its kinship with rap. For these students, poetry can become a gateway to other forms of writing. It can help teach skills that come in handy with other kinds of writing—like precise, economical diction, for example. When Carl Sandburg writes, “The fog comes/on little cat feet,” in just six words, he endows a natural phenomenon with character, a pace, and a spirit. All forms of writing benefits from the powerful and concise phrases found in poems.
I have used cut-up poetry (a variation on the sort “popularized” by William Burroughs and Brion Gysin) to teach 9th grade students, most of whom learned English as a second language, about grammar and literary devices. They made collages after slicing up dozens of “sources,” identifying the adjectives and adverbs, utilizing parallel structure, alliteration, assonance, and other figures of speech. Short poems make a complete textual analysis more manageable for English language learners. When teaching students to read and evaluate every single word of a text, it makes sense to demonstrate the practice with a brief poem—like Gwendolyn Brooks’s “We Real Cool.”
Students can learn how to utilize grammar in their own writing by studying how poets do—and do not—abide by traditional writing rules in their work. Poetry can teach writing and grammar conventions by showing what happens when poets strip them away or pervert them for effect. Dickinson often capitalizes common nouns and uses dashes instead of commas to note sudden shifts in focus. Agee uses colons to create dramatic, speech-like pauses. Cummings of course rebels completely. He usually eschews capitalization in his proto-text message poetry, wrapping frequent asides in parentheses and leaving last lines dangling on their pages, period-less. In “next to of course god america i,” Cummings strings together, in the first 13 lines, a cavalcade of jingoistic catch-phrases a politician might utter, and the lack of punctuation slowing down and organizing the assault accentuates their unintelligibility and banality and heightens the satire. The abuse of conventions helps make the point. In class, it can help a teacher explain the exhausting effect of run-on sentences—or illustrate how clichés weaken an argument.
Yet, despite all of the benefits poetry brings to the classroom, I have been hesitant to use poems as a mere tool for teaching grammar conventions. Even the in-class disembowelment of a poem’s meaning can diminish the personal, even transcendent, experience of reading a poem. Billy Collins characterizes the latter as a “deadening” act that obscures the poem beneath the puffed-up importance of its interpretation. In his poem “Introduction to Poetry,” he writes: “all they want to do is tie the poem to a chair with rope/and torture a confession out of it./They begin beating it with a hose/to find out what it really means.”
The point of reading a poem is not to try to “solve” it. Still, that quantifiable process of demystification is precisely what teachers are encouraged to teach students, often in lieu of curating a powerful experience through literature. The literature itself becomes secondary, boiled down to its Cliff’s Notes demi-glace. I haven’t wanted to risk that with the poems that enchanted me in my youth.
Teachers should produce literature lovers as well as keen critics, striking a balance between teaching writing, grammar, and analytical strategies and then also helping students to see that literature should be mystifying. It should resist easy interpretation and beg for return visits. Poetry serves this purpose perfectly. I am confident my 12th graders know how to write essays. I know they can mine a text for subtle messages. But I worry sometimes if they’ve learned this lesson. In May, a month before they graduate, I may read some poetry with my seniors—to drive home that and nothing more.
Strategies for Developing Speaking Skills
Students often think that the ability to speak a language is the product of language learning, but speaking is also a crucial part of the language learning process. Effective instructors teach students speaking strategies -- using minimal responses, recognizing scripts, and using language to talk about language -- that they can use to help themselves expand their knowledge of the language and their confidence in using it. These instructors help students learn to speak so that the students can use speaking to learn.
1. Using minimal responses
Language learners who lack confidence in their ability to participate successfully in oral interaction often listen in silence while others do the talking. One way to encourage such learners to begin to participate is to help them build up a stock of minimal responses that they can use in different types of exchanges. Such responses can be especially useful for beginners.
Minimal responses are predictable, often idiomatic phrases that conversation participants use to indicate understanding, agreement, doubt, and other responses to what another speaker is saying. Having a stock of such responses enables a learner to focus on what the other participant is saying, without having to simultaneously plan a response.
2. Recognizing scripts
Some communication situations are associated with a predictable set of spoken exchanges -- a script. Greetings, apologies, compliments, invitations, and other functions that are influenced by social and cultural norms often follow patterns or scripts. So do the transactional exchanges involved in activities such as obtaining information and making a purchase. In these scripts, the relationship between a speaker's turn and the one that follows it can often be anticipated.
Instructors can help students develop speaking ability by making them aware of the scripts for different situations so that they can predict what they will hear and what they will need to say in response. Through interactive activities, instructors can give students practice in managing and varying the language that different scripts contain.
3. Using language to talk about language
Language learners are often too embarrassed or shy to say anything when they do not understand another speaker or when they realize that a conversation partner has not understood them. Instructors can help students overcome this reticence by assuring them that misunderstanding and the need for clarification can occur in any type of interaction, whatever the participants' language skill levels. Instructors can also give students strategies and phrases to use for clarification and comprehension check.
By encouraging students to use clarification phrases in class when misunderstanding occurs, and by responding positively when they do, instructors can create an authentic practice environment within the classroom itself. As they develop control of various clarification strategies, students will gain confidence in their ability to manage the various communication situations that they may encounter outside the classroom.
Four skills
ntroduction
The teaching of English as a foreign language is now one of the most important subjects in most European primary schools. The implementation of English has brought along the need to establish clear objectives that are different to the ones traditionally assigned to secondary schools. While in secondary schools we still find, in many cases, a teaching based in the formal aspects of the language, i.e. grammar; primary school teachers have had to adopt a different approach as the age of the children make the teaching of formal aspects not advisable. As a result of this point of view, the different Educational Departments have decided to establish, as the main purpose of the EFL teaching, the development of the four skills: listening, speaking, reading and writing. However, the implementation of this approach has not been trouble-free as many teachers insist on asking their children to understand every single word they listen to or read, or expect their pupils to write or speak without making the mistakes normally found in the process of acquiring any language.
The main purpose of this paper is to provide some guidelines that we hope can be useful to teachers of English as a foreign language in primary schools.
Listening
Listening is the language skill which learners usually find the most difficult. This often is because they feel under unnecessary pressure to understand every word. To achieve the aims related to this skill, the teacher plays an important role that is defined in the following steps.
1. It is important to help pupils prepare for the listening task well before they hear the text itself. First of all the teacher must ensure that the pupils understand the language they need to complete the task and are fully aware of exactly what is expected of them. Reassure the pupils that they do not need to understand every word they hear.
2. The next important step is to encourage pupils to anticipate what they are going to hear. In everyday life, the situation, the speaker, and visual clues all help us to decode oral messages. A way to make things a bit easier to the pupils is to present the listening activity within the context of the topic of a teaching unit. This in itself will help pupils to predict what the answers might be. The teacher can help them further by asking questions and using the illustrations to encourage pupils to guess the answers even before they hear the text.
3. During the listening the pupils should be able to concentrate on understanding the message so make sure they are not trying to read, draw, and write at the same time. Always give a second chance to listen to the text to provide a new opportunity to those who were not able to do the task.
4. Finally, when pupils have completed the activity, invite answers from the whole class. Try not to put individual pupils under undue pressure. Rather than confirming whether an answer is correct or not, play the cassette again and allow pupils to listen again for confirmation. You may be given a variety of answers, in which case list them all on the board and play the text again, so that the class can listen and choose the correct one. Even if the pupils all appear to have completed the task successfully, always encourage them to listen to the text once more and check their answers for themselves.
Speaking
First of all, we must take into account that the level of language input (listening) must be higher than the level of language production expected of the pupils. So we have many speaking activities used in the first levels that enable pupils to participate with a minimal verbal response. However in the last levels, pupils are encouraged to begin to manipulate language and express themselves in a much more personal way.
In primary schools two main types of speaking activities are used. The first type, songs, chants, and poems, encourages pupils to mimic the model they hear on the cassette. This helps pupils to master the sounds, rhythms, and intonation of the English language through simple reproduction. The games and pair work activities on the other hand, although always based on a given model, encourage the pupils to begin to manipulate the language by presenting them with a certain amount of choice, albeit within a fairly controlled situation.
In order for any speaking activity to be successful children need to acknowledge that there is a real reason for asking a question or giving a piece of information. Therefore, make sure the activities you present to the pupils, provide a reason for speaking, whether this is to play a game or to find out real information about friends in the class.
Once the activity begins, make sure that the children are speaking as much English as possible without interfering to correct the mistakes that they will probably make. Try to treat errors casually by praising the utterance and simply repeating it correctly without necessarily highlighting the errors. And finally, always offer praise for effort regardless of the accuracy of the English produced.
Reading
In order to make reading an interesting challenge as opposed to a tedious chore, it is important that pupils do not labour over every word, whether they are skimming the text for general meaning or scanning it to pick out specific information. Other things to keep in mind are:
1. When choosing texts consider not only their difficulty level, but also their interest or their humour so that children will want to read for the same reasons they read in their own language: to be entertained or to find out something they do not already know.
2. As with listening activities, it is important to spend time preparing for the task by using the illustrations (a usual feature in reading activities for children), pupils' own knowledge about the subject matter, and key vocabulary to help the pupils to predict the general content of the text. Discuss the subject and ask questions to elicit language and to stimulate the pupils' interest in the text before they begin reading. Also make sure that the pupils understand the essential vocabulary they need to complete the task before they begin to read.
3. While the children are reading the text, move around the class providing support if pupils need it. Where possible, encourage pupils to work out the meaning of vocabulary as they come across it, using the context and the supporting illustrations.
4. Do not encourage pupils to read texts aloud unless this is to learn a play or recite a poem. Reading aloud inhibits most pupils and forces them to concentrate on what they are saying as opposed to what they are reading and the meaning is very often lost.
Writing
In primary schools, EFL pupils progress from writing isolated words and phrases, to short paragraphs about themselves or about very familiar topics (family, home, hobbies, friends, food, etc.)
Since many pupils at this level are not yet capable either linguistically or intellectually of creating a piece of written text from scratch, it is important that time is spent building up the language they will need and providing a model on which they can then base their own efforts. The writing activities should therefore be based on a parallel text and guide the pupils, using simple cues. These writing activities generally appear towards the end of a unit so that pupils have had plenty of exposure to the language and practice of the main structures and vocabulary they need.
At this stage, the pupils' work will invariably contain mistakes. Again, the teacher should try to be sensitive in his/her correction and not necessarily insist on every error being highlighted. A piece of written work covered in red pen is demoralizing and generally counter-productive. Where possible, encourage pupils to correct their own mistakes as they work. If there is time, encourage pupils to decorate their written work and where feasible display their efforts in the classroom.
