Shah Zobair Hossain
Abstract: This article aims to review the significance of poetry as a language teaching tool/content and to demonstrate how a poem can be used effectively and creatively in English as a Foreign or Second Language (EFL/ESL) classroom to improve the communicative competence of students in four core skills although there have been contradicting views regarding the uses of poems in the EFL/ESL classroom. Literary genres in general and poetry, in particular, have long been detached from teaching programs because they are not considered an appropriate tool for language teaching. Fortunately, in recent decades, there has been a renaissance interest in manipulating literature, especially poems in language teaching. Despite the renewed interest in poetry in the EFL classroom, little has been published on teaching language through poetry at the tertiary level in Bangladesh. This paper shows that the appropriate selection of poems and the design of various sets of activities according to the learners’ needs may be used to encourage and expedite the process of mastering the English language vital skills—listening, speaking, reading, and writing. In this regard, two celebrated poems—“Ulysses” by Tennyson and “Under the Greenwood Tree” by Shakespeare—have been used in this article as a language-based model to foster students’ communicative competence in English.
Keywords: CLT, poetry, ESL, EFL, second language (L2), suggestive model
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