Poetry in Motion - I mean MOtivaTION

Barbara Clark

Barbara Clark is a teacher trainer, at Bilkent University School of English Language, Ankara, working as a tutor on the M.A. in Management in Education programme which incorporates the Cambridge ESOL DELTA. She has also taught in Devon, Singapore and Portugal. She is particularly interested in Teacher Development.

Menu

Introduction
Why poetry?
Teaching ideas
For Skills practice
For Pronunciation Practice
Conclusion
Bibliography
Appendix

Introduction

Recently my Turkish friend gave birth to a Bouncing Baby Boy (how's that for alliteration?) and I notice that I draw on my distant memories of Nursery Rhymes whenever I pick him up and walk about with him. I also notice that the Turkish women in his life - his mum, grandmothers and aunts - seem to be doing something very similar in Turkish. It seems me to be real life proof that there is something in the rhythm and rhyme of poetry that the human being reacts to, and starts to make sense of, very early in life. This has led me to thinking about whether English Language teachers can make a profitable use of poetry in their classrooms.

Why poetry?

As a human being I realise that I need to know how to survive in foreign language environment and to do that I need to be able to order a meal, buy a train ticket and draw out money from the bank. However it is difficult to feel interested and motivated on such a limited diet of topics. The passion and the sense of mystery that literature, including poetry of course, can give rise to can surely be given a place in the ELT classroom.

Spiro (2004) holds that the typical features of poetry make it very suitable for language teaching. She points out that controlled language practice shares certain features with poetry. There is repetition and pattern (for example, in oral and written drills of grammar structures and in gap filling or substitution exercises in which learners use given patterns as models for other sentences). Also, the length of text in a poem is usually short, as is text we use for controlled language practice. Spiro (2004) also says that in less controlled practice, or production, the learner is encouraged 'to be creative and to use strategies for applying the familiar to the unfamiliar - just as poets do.' (Spiro, 2004:7).

So why not make more use of poetry in our classrooms? It might create mystery. It might arouse passion. Best of all, it might create the motivation lacking in an 'In the Bank' role-play.

Teaching ideas

For Skills practice

The poem, 'The Couple Upstairs' by Henry Money (retrieved on 15.05.2006 from www.PoemsAbout.com, see Appendix 1) lends itself to a number of activities that practice one or more of the four skills. The poem tells about hearing a woman's footsteps on the stairs as she leaves the apartment above the poet's.

The Couple Upstairs

Shoes instead of slippers down the stairs,
She ran out with her clothes.

And the front door banged and I saw her
Walking crookedly, like naked, to a car.

She was not always with him up there,
And yet they seemed inviolate, like us,
Our loves in sympathy. Her going

Thrills and frightens us. We come awake
And talk excitedly about ourselves, like guests.

Activity 1. Listening and Speaking practice
The participants close their eyes and visualise the 'couple' as the teacher reads the poem. They share their visualisation with a partner. Background music can be used during the visualisation.

Activity 2. To practice inferring meaning
The learners are asked to choose one or more words from the poem and write a question about it. (eg Why was she 'running'? Why were we 'thrilled' and why were we 'frightened'?)
They pass their question(s) to another pair to answer.

Activity 3. Creative Writing
(which also gives practice in reading between the lines as learners would formulate some sort of hypothesis about what the background situation is).
Learners are asked to write the note the 'she' left on the kitchen table when she left. This could lead into a role-play of what happened when the 'note' was found.

Teachers can use (adapted versions of) the ideas above with other poems of their own choice, or poems chosen by the learners.

For Pronunciation Practice

Poems that have a clear regular rhythm and rhyme can be used to help learners develop their knowledge and use of the stressed time pronunciation of English. I have used the activity described below, suggested by Underhill (1994), using a 'fun' poem called "Football through the Ages" (see appendix 1), from a great little anthology called "Vikings Don't wear Pants: Potty Poems of the Past" (by Roger Stevens and Celia Warren) that I found in the souvenir shop at the Jorvik Centre in York.

The teacher makes a recording of the poem. It is played to the learners. They transcribe it, marking the stresses and then they try to copy the stress and intonation patterns by reading it out loud together with the recording. Underhill (1994:181) calls this 'Parallel Speaking'. If a language laboratory is available this would be ideal for learners to do this activity. If not it can still be done in the classroom, in fact lending itself to work on choral recitation - something that younger learners enjoy. If you don't want the learners to spend time doing the transcription you can use prepared copies of the poem.

Poems that follow strong patterns of rhythm and rhyme can be used for an activity such as this - limericks are an obvious choice. Of course, learners can be encouraged to write their own limericks and these can be read out in class. (See appendix 2 for a sample limerick that I composed while taking a shower one morning.)

Conclusion

During my career, I've often felt that using poetry in the ELT classroom is regarded as an 'extra' -not nearly as important as how to buy train tickets, how to order a meal or how to piece together an academic essay. Perhaps this is because reading and writing poetry is not high on the list of learner's reasons for learning English. Also, poetry in any language is a serious art form that is usually respected, but not always accessible to every reader. However, I hope that the ideas that I have put forward here illustrate that using poetry in a language lesson doesn't always involve the sometimes daunting prospect of interpreting deep thought expressed in imagery that is difficult to understand. Of course, there can be a place for literary study in the English classroom, but perhaps it can be preceded by or complemented by using poetry that brings the element of fun into the learning environment.

Bibliography

Spiro, J. (2004). Creative Poetry Writing. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Stevens, R. and Warren, C. (2001). Vikings Don't Wear Pants. Rotheram: The King's England Press.
Underhill, A (1994). Sound Foundations. Oxford: Macmillan Heinemann.

Appendix

Appendix 1

Football Through the Ages

By Celia Warren

Football grew from itchy feet
Kicking whatever they found in the street:
A pebble, a stick, a rolling stone,
A clod of clay or an animal's bone.
The left-over bladder of a butchered pig
, Inflated and tied off, was perfect to kick.
If something would roll it would do for the game,
Which then had not even been given a name
Till, on through the ages, the game was to grow,
At long last becoming the football we know.
Oh I'm glad of my football, I'm glad of the rules,
I'm glad of the pitches at clubs and at schools,
I'm glad of my kit, but I am even gladder
The days have long gone when they kicked a pig's bladder.

Appendix 2

A Limerick
(composed by Barbara Clark one morning as she was getting up :)

There was a young lady from Batman*
Who'd fallen in love with a fat man
She met him in Rome
And brought him back home
And her dad said, "Are you marrying that man?"
*Name of a city in Turkey

Please check the Creative Methodology for the Classroom course at Pilgrims website.
Please check the Humanising Large Classes course at Pilgrims website.