ELT News Think Tank

Panelists: Peter | Marc | Curtis | Chuck | Chris
Date: October 2003
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Topic: "How can we use poetry in the language classroom?"

Chuck Sandy

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This activity and several that followed were quite enjoyable of course, but I began to understand that it would be possible to build a series of content-rich lessons around poetry and I began exploring ways to do this and the right set of materials to use.

This was when I first came across The Favorite Poem Project ( www.favoritepoem.org/). Former American Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky launched this site in 1997 after sending out an invitation for anyone in the U.S. to submit their favorite poem and to say what it means to them. Over 18,000 Americans, from ages 5 to 97 and from every possible background submitted a poem. From these, 50 people were chosen to be filmed reading their poem and talking about it. These 50 video clips, each from 2-5 minutes in length, are available on the website, and each one is something remarkable - especially for our English learners, those clips recorded by people who's first language is not English.

“Each student had put a great deal of him or herself into their work with their poem, and sensing this, the listeners were quiet and respectful.”

I gave my students the task of spending some time looking through the poems and video clips on this site in order to find one poem that they liked - for whatever reason. They were then to spend some time working on their own with this poem and the video that went along with it, and then in the next class to share that poem with a partner in the usual way - by explaining why they chose it and what they liked about it.

From there, the project was for each student in our class to prepare to make their own "favorite poem presentation." Students thought through and scripted their responses, practiced reading their poem, worked as much as getting their ideas down as they did on their pronunciation and delivery, and then, one day, we had the presentations. One by one the students got up and introduced their poem, talked about why they chose it, what it meant to them and what it reminded them of, and then read the poem to the class. We didn't video this, but we should have because it was brilliant.

Each student had put a great deal of him or herself into their work with their poem, and sensing this, the listeners were quiet and respectful. It helped, too, that these listeners were also evaluating each of their peers by filling out a simple little evaluation sheet giving a score of A-E on content, delivery, and overall presentation. In this way, everyone was involved at all times.

What was most interesting to me was the wide range of poems chosen. A tough girl chose Gwendolyn Brooks' "We Real Cool." A quiet boy chose Emily Dickinson's "I'm nobody, who are you?" One boy who had some issues with his father who'd died chose to work with Theodore Roethke's poem "My Papa's Waltz," the one that begins, "The whiskey on your breath/ could make a small boy dizzy." Another student who explained that no one really knew her true feelings read Langston Hughes' "Minstral Man." A boy who had just come to the realization that he wasn't quite good enough to be a professional baseball player read Earnest Lawrence Thayer's "Casey At the Bat," a very long poem, but presented with such feeling and understanding that there were first tears and then wild applause when he finished.

From a standard notional-functional communicative task-based framework, it's hard to qualify what students learned from this work. However, if that limited framework is set aside and we instead focus on the larger issues of learning, it's difficult not to see how much and how many different kinds of learning took place in this non-exceptional class of university freshman.

What's hard for me to understand now is why I kept my poetry life and my teaching life separate for so long. In an effort to bring those two parts of me further together, I invite you to read and listen to some of Cid Corman's most well known and most accessible poems, and to visit my online poetry journal where you're welcome to read, comment, and submit your own favorite poem. I hope you will.

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Panelists: Peter | Marc | Curtis | Chuck | Chris

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Chuck Sandy, Chubu University

Co-author of two series from CUP, Passages and Connect

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