Teaching Poetry in English First Additional Language Classroom through Online Classroom Presentation at a South African Rural University

Abstract

Poetry is a key element of many literature curricula around the world wherein literary scholars such as Hanauer (2001) presented various theoretical works that provided principles for poetry pedagogy. The challenging task which teachers face while teaching the English language through poetry is enhancing the sense of value and enjoyment among students who are not interested in poetry due to students’ low proficiency, teachers using traditional teaching methods and the selection of poetry texts among others. Against this background, this study investigated the effectiveness of teaching poetry in English First Additional Language classroom through online classroom presentation at a South African Rural University. This study was guided by Poetry Teaching (POT) Framework in teaching English First Additional Language through poetry which fosters four strands of language (reading, listening, speaking and writing) to highlight the role of poetry in achieving linguistic outcomes with specific features of poetry (i.e. themes, structure, commentary, setting, tone, mood, historical context, symbols, motifs, use of language, deviant forms used, figures of speech, inherent meanings in lines etc.) were given attention to make this framework peculiar to using poetry in the language classroom. Qualitative approach was employed through semi-structured in-depth interviews to explore the experiences and challenges of pre-service teachers in teaching poetry in English First Additional language classroom through classroom presentation. The findings of this study revealed that using online classroom presentation to incorporate poetry into the English First Additional classroom helped pre-service teachers to realize their potential of sharing experiences for better interaction, cooperation and understanding of the analysis of poems.  The study also found that teaching English poetry as a model in English First Additional Language curriculum reinforces students' grammatical and lexical knowledge and promote their creative writing skills. This study recommends further research to investigate the effectiveness of similar models or frameworks to foster the incorporation of literature into language teaching curricula to provide deeper insight and help language teachers to be aware of students’ previous experiences with poetry, not only in English First Additional Language but also in their mother tongue, and to identify the reticence and frustrations that might have arisen from poetry lessons.