Poetry in the adult EFL classroom: improving pronunciation and providing opportunities for cultural and personal enrichment

Abstract

Adult learners of English as a foreign language in the Spanish context don’t usually receive specific training on pronunciation and, due to the complexity of English phonology, usually present serious difficulties with this aspect of the language. At the same time, the focus on teaching the language often ignores the use of authentic cultural or literary products which could offer benefits not only at a linguistic level but also at a broader cultural and educational level. With the ultimate aim of improving EFL teaching practices, we intend to explore the possibilities of a very specific technique, the imitation of poetry recitals, as a tool to improve students’ pronunciation and students’ cultural and personal background. This study consists of a 12 week methodological intervention to both better the pronunciation of 23 Spanish EFL adult learners and to ascertain whether such contact with poetry provided cultural and personal enrichment for the participants. Two intact classes at the B1 and B2 levels of the European Framework of Reference for Languages (low and high intermediate levels) took part in the study. Each level had a control group and an experimental group. All 4 groups had 4 hours of English class per week, divided into two 120 minute sessions. The experimental groups had one of those 120 minute sessions dedicated to the project for 10 training weeks. There was an average of 12 students in each group. Each training week students were presented with a distinct and renowned poem from the English language literary canon. The poems were chosen based on their popularity in three distinct English speaking cultures (British, Irish and American) as well as their accessibility (length, vocabulary and theme) to L2 learners. There were 4 themes: life and living, nature, love and death. The training class comprised of two parts, the first half was teacher-led with a PowerPoint presentation of the weekly poem: author’s biography, the poem’s literary and cultural significance, literary analysis and examples of native recitals. In the second half of the class each student was recorded reading the poem in question aloud whilst their classmates discussed poem specific and general thematic questions. After the training session, the students were emailed the aforementioned weekly PowerPoint presentation as well as a Word document which provided the poem’s text, imitation links and specific and general thematic questions about the poem. The students were to email two recordings to the instructor on the eve of the following week’s class, one short free speech recording answering on the many questions of their choice and one poetry recital imitating one of the models. As for the process of data collection, the study followed a pre-test (Week 0), post-test (Week 11) and delayed post-test design (Week 36) with 10 training weeks between Week 0 and Week 11. In Week 0 the participants were given questionnaires to gage their experience of and thoughts on poetry, literature and pronunciation in the L2 classroom. They were also recorded reciting a poem they had not seen before (Poem 0). In Week 11 they were given a questionnaire to measure whether such prolonged contact with poetry offered them cultural and personal enrichment. All four groups were again recorded reciting the poem from the pretest (P02) and the experimental groups also recorded a Free Speech sample (FS02) related to the theme of the poem. Finally 6 months later (delayed post-test) all four groups were recorded reciting the aforesaid poem (P03) and, once more, only the experimental groups recorded a second free speech sample (FS03). The recordings were evaluated by 4 native evaluators. Results regarding poetry effects on pronunciation show interesting differences at three levels: between experimental and control groups, between B1 and B2 levels and, within the experimental group, between the scores students obtained in free speech productions and poetry recitals. In summary, the B1 experimental group’s ability to recite a poem increased sharply in the post-test, outperforming the B2 experimental group and the control groups. The B2 group’s poetry recital result, on the contrary, remained constant with their pre-test poetry recital and indeed, they even scored less than the B2 control group. In the delayed post-test the B1 experimental group’s poetry recital result fell sharply but it still bettered the B1 control group. In stark contrast with this, the B2 experimental group was the only group which increased its poetry recital score in the delayed post-test to become the highest scoring group. For the free speech, only recorded for experimental groups, the B1 group scored comparatively low in the post-test but rose sharply in the delayed post-test. The B2 group remained consistently high in both free speech post-tests. Finally, both experimental groups did better in their free speech than in their poetry recital in the delayed post-test. As for results in terms of cultural and personal enrichment, the vast majority of students confirmed in their questionnaires that they had barely had any exposure to poetry before, felt that there was a place for poetry in the EFL classroom and that they had become culturally and personally enriched by such contact with it. In light of our findings, we will argue that poetry deserves a place in EFL classrooms.