December 2008

Dear YANA,
Poetry is a challenge for me to teach and for my students to enjoy.  Do you have any wonderful ideas on how to help students feel comfortable reading poetry in a language that’s not their own?  I love to read poetry for my own enjoyment, but simply cannot find ways to share that joy with my students.

Hello,
I have just spent a weekend of immersion with 50 wonderful teachers of Spanish.  Our primary purpose for attending was two-fold: to improve our conversation skills, and to broaden our knowledge of the language and cultures we teach.  We spent an evening reading poetry, and most of that time concentrated on the reading of just one poem.  The process was revolutionary for me.  We focused on discovering the beauty of the words, the sounds, and the emotions created by those sounds.  We never finished because this process of discovery will never finish; it was like opening a rose bud one petal at a time, each petal beautiful in its own right.  We explored a variety of ways to read it so students might enjoy the poem for the feel and sound as well as for the meaning.  Here’s how we did it, focusing on the process (the reading) rather than on the product (the meaning).

• We read a collection of poems before attending the weekend.  Since these were all by the same poet, one we had all studied in college and who appears in most text books somewhere along the way, all of us were familiar with the poet and his writing.  We came not knowing what we would be doing with the poetry, but expecting a session on how to extract meaning and on the structure of poetry.  Not so …
• The majority of the vocabulary in the poem is familiar to intermediate level students, so we by-passed that part of the poem.  Instead, we concentrated on the sounds of the poem. 
• We broke into groups of 2 and read the poem by stanza to each other.  Each group of 2 was assigned a number which corresponded to a stanza.  We practiced reading this stanza out loud, as a chorus of two.
• We then gathered as a large group, randomly placed with our partners.  We read the poem out loud in a variety of ways: by stanza, by high voice/low voice, by where we were in the group, and by volume, with crescendos and decrescendos at various places throughout the poem.
• About 3 or 4 readings in, people were starting to feel a rhythm, some marking time with their hands, others walking around the back of the group in time to the “music” of the poem.
• Several times we would stop and talk about the different effects our reading had on the feeling of the poem.  Occasionally someone would ask what a key word meant, as our students will do.  Always they were key words that lead to a deeper understanding of the poem.

Use a similar method with your classes, being sure to map out the choral nature of the poem ahead of time and the variations to be used for the choral reading.  One of our participants likened it to a Greek chorus.  This process will help you see and understand the internal workings of the poem.  Choose a poem that has vocabulary that is relatively accessible to the students.  Be sure it is long enough to have half the number of lines as students in the class, plus the repeating lines.   (If you have 30 students, the poem needs to have 15 lines, plus the chorus.) Number each line to correspond to a group of 2 students.  It is really quite effective if those lines repeat frequently throughout the poem.

As with anything we present in class, it must have a context, and a foundation, before jumping into the true unknown.  Be sure to tie the poem into the basic lesson of the week and subtly drop pre-poetry-reading pieces of information prior to the poem.   The context can be a cultural, geographic, musical, political or historical reference. 

There are infinite variations on this theme; explore them and try “weird” combinations.  This is a technique that takes practice, but with practice it will become a basic of your repertoire and students will enjoy reading poetry.  I hope you find this as eye-opening an exercise as we did.  I extend my appreciation to Janet Beckmann and Karen Falcon for leading us in this enlightening activity.
YANA

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