This chapter discusses the place of poetry in the language classroom. It begins by focussing on those aspects of poetry which are linguistically distinctive and then asks teachers to examine their own beliefs about the relevance of poetry in the language classroom. Activities for use with students at both lower and upper levels of language competence are presented for discussion. Finally, teachers have an opportunity to plan learning material for use with their own students.

Putting a poem back together again

In this section, we think about some of the distinctive features of poetry as well as ways of using poetry in the language classroom. We begin by looking at a type of activity which could be used with students. It involves the reordering of the lines of a poem.

Task 1

1. a) Think about the word sea. Write down any associations the word has for you.

2. b) Here is a poem with twelve lines. All the lines have been jumbled up so they are not in the correct order. Try to reorder them so that they make a complete poem. The title of the poem is ‘maggie and milly and molly and may’.