Казахский государственный женский
педагогический университет Вестник №3(51), 2014 г.
72
ОҚЫТУ ӘДІСТЕМЕСІ
МЕТОДИКА ПРЕПОДАВАНИИ
TEACHING OF METHODOLOGY
UDC 378.147.34
WAYS OF USING POEMS IN TEACHING ENGLISH
M. Akimbekova, Zh. Abdikarimova,
senior teachers
(city Almaty, Kazakh National
University named al-Farabi,
Faculty of philology, Literary Studies
and World Languages,
Department of Foreign Languages for
Humanitarian Faculties)
Abstract: While teaching English to Language Faculty students there are a lot of
opportunities to use authentic literature to develop their productive skills and to help them
discover their creative power. As they are students who love studying languages and might
already enjoy reading and listening to poetry in their own language, they might enjoy reading it
perhaps in English too. Poems are, after all, authentic texts. This is a great motivator. Poems are
often rich in cultural references, and they present a wide range of learning opportunities. For the
teachers, the aim is to teach English through poetry, not to teach the poetry itself, so they don't
need to be a literature expert.
Keywords: poems, productive work, activities, students’ translation, to create the
atmosphere. Most of the tried and tested activities used regularly by language teachers can be
adapted easily to bring poetry into the classroom. Here are some of them:
- Communicative speaking activities
- Working on pronunciation and reciting
- Writing activities
- Translating poems
Communicative speaking activities. Before doing any productive work, the teacher can give
his/her students plenty of pre-reading activities so that they are adequately prepared.
- As a way in to a poem, you might play some background music to create the atmosphere,
show some pictures to introduce the topic, and then get students to think about their personal
knowledge or experience which relates to this topic.
- They then talk about the poem, first with a partner and then in small groups, perhaps
coming together as a class at the end to share ideas. The teacher monitors and feeds in ideas and
vocabulary if necessary, gives brief feedback on language used and notes any language problems
to be dealt with at a later date.
- You can prepare worksheets for pre-reading speaking activities which might involve a quiz,
a questionnaire, sentence stems to be completed and discussed, statements to be ranked and
discussed, and so on.
- Students might predict endings to verses, the whole poem, or events occurring after the end
of the poem.
- Afterwards, the students could talk about their personal response to the poem, discuss the
characters and theme, or debate the moral issues.
Қазақ
мемлекеттік қыздар
педагогикалық университеті Хабаршы №3 (51), 2014 ж.
73
- Role plays work well, interviewing a partner, or even dramatising the poem and making a
video. Students could compare poems on related topics, with different groups working on different
poems and then regrouping to pool their ideas.
Working on pronunciation and Reciting. It can be fun to get students to rehearse and perform a
poem. The teacher reads the poem to them or play a recording, and they identify the stresses and
pauses.
- You can take a chunk (usually a line, sometimes two) at a time, and one half of the class
claps out the rhythm while the other half beats time, and then they swap over.
- The teacher recites while they mumble rhythmically, and then as their confidence grows
they could chant in a whisper, a shout, or show a range of emotion. This tends to work best when
it is improvised. It's a high
energy activity, and you have to know and trust each other.
- Sometimes you can do intensive phoneme work centred on the rhyming patterns in the
poem: Some poems are crying out to be exploited in this way. You elicit possible rhymes before
revealing the poet's choice, and discuss which suggestions have exactly the same sound and
which don't, leading to a minimal pair activity.
In our practice we used the poem
«Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening» by an American
poet Robert Frost to develop the students’ feel of the rhyme and rhythm and improve their
pronunciation.
Whose woods these are I think I
know.
His house is in the village
though;
He will not see me stopping here
To
watch his woods fill up with snow.
My little horse must think it
queer
To stop without a farmhouse
near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of
the year.
He gives his harness bells
a shake
To ask if there is some
mistake.
The only other sound's the sweep
Of easy wind and downy
flake.
The woods are lovely, dark and
deep.
But I have promises to
keep,
And miles to go before I
sleep,
And miles to go before I
sleep.
Writing activities.A poem can spark off some wonderful creative writing. Students can add more
lines or stanzas individually or in pairs or groups.
- They can write a letter to a character in the poem, write about what happened before the
beginning or after the ending of the poem and so on.
- Students could use the poem as a starting point and model for some parallel writing: Each
group might contribute a verse to a collective poem (or rap).
- Genre transfer presents a lot of opportunities for writing practice; letters, diary entries,
radio plays, newspaper articles, agony aunt columns all based on the original text from a poem.
- Generally students find reformulation exercises very stimulating, where they switch
between formal and informal language.
- Longer poems can be summarised in fifty words.
