A letter to the teachers of English: 72Teaching a poem in the Secondary class (2) [Archives:2005/810/Education]
Dr. M.N.K.Bose ([email protected])
Associate Professor of English,
Faculty of Arts, Ibb.
Dear Fellow teachers,
In the last letter, I shared with you some of my ideas about the importance of teaching poems to the Arabic learners of English in schools and colleges. I also told you how the pleasant experience of learning poems is spoiled in the colleges by the careless selection of poems for teaching.
Fortunately or unfortunately, this problem does not exist in schools; fortunately because teachers, who lack the resources, competence and experience are spared from the trouble of selecting the poems for their learners; unfortunately because poems chosen by the teachers for their learners are better suited to them than those selected by the outsiders. The selection of poems in English should be done taking into account the language level, experience, culture of the learners and also the linguistic difficulties and the content of the poems selected.
Poems pose many problems to the learners in terms of the language as well as content. The language of a poem is different from that of a prose passage in that there are many deviations from the normal way of expression. For example, in 'The Daffodils', the poet says 'ten thousand I saw at a glance', beginning the sentence with an object; such deviations are common in poems. In 'A Child Half-Asleep', the poet says 'Stealthily parting the small-hours silence, a hardly-embodied fragment of his brain, comes down to sit with me as I work late'; such expressions of imagination are hardly used in prose writings.
In addition, the use of poetic features such as metaphors, similes, personification, alliteration, assonance, rhyme etc make the poem more difficult to decode; a successful understanding of a poem lies in getting at the poet's message after teasing out the linguistic and poetic features in it. A good command of English and experience in reading many poems alone can enable our learners to achieve the ability to understand poems successfully. Teaching poems in schools and colleges helps them gain this useful experience.
Let's look at the poem included in CECY PB6 closely. It is given in the Arts Reader in page no. 61. The title of the poem is 'Leisure' and it is written by William Henry Davies. It has seven stanzas, each stanza with two lines. There is a rhyme pattern; look at the last word in each line in the stanzas: care-stare, boughs-cows, pass-grass, daylight-night, glance-dance, can-began and care-stare. Each pair sounds alike making the rhyme pattern. This can be highlighted while you read the poem aloud, giving a little extra force to these words, in order to draw the learners' attention.
A few words in the poem are glossed in the box at the bottom. Are these words enough for understanding the poem? Yes and No. Yes, if your students are clever and no, if they are not. You can choose to gloss a few more words in the poem; beneath, enrich, poor life are some examples. The words you choose depend on your students and you have to make a wise guess about it, because glossing too many words kills the thrill of their struggling to understand them on their own. This decision-taking is like tightrope walking and you have to learn this art only through trial and error. You can extract the meanings of difficult words in the poem from the students by giving them parallel words or opposites or using them in familiar contexts. Using suitable aids can also help; for example, nuts can be understood with the help of real nuts brought to the class. Let's continue the discussion in the next letter.
Yours fraternally,
Dr.M.N.K.Bose.
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