Shall I compare thee to a native speaker? The imitation and instruction of English poetry with EFL learners

Abstract

This report concerns a 6 week specific methodological intervention to better the pronunciation of 7 Spanish EFL secondary students via the autonomous, at-home poetic imitation of native English speaking models. For 6 weeks, an intact class of EFL learners (number 15) in a Spanish secondary school were presented with an analysis and discussion of contemporary and 20th century poetry, related to love, death and poems of adolescence. After initially being presented with the native models in class, 7 participating students imitated the recitals (from a multi-accented variety of online resources) at home. In order to measure students’ gains in terms of pronunciation, one initial and one final imitation of a specific poem, as well as a thematically specific free speech sample were delivered by every student. More specifically, at weeks 1 and 6, the same topic for both poetry and free speech was recorded. Also, an additional free speech topic and poem were also recorded at week 6 in order to see if the improvements observed in a specific content were also applied to a new piece of language. The recordings were examined and evaluated by 2 native evaluators. The results indicate that the students had better quality pronunciation when imitating and talking about the same free speech topic but, when given an unrehearsed poem and different free speech topic, they seemed unable to assign the improvements to the unpractised poetry and unfamiliar free speech topic. Whole class impressions were also investigated by means of a final questionnaire. Here, all students testified to the importance of pronunciation; they believed the activity to be helpful their pronunciation; they found it enjoyable and would enthusiastically welcome more poetry and literature into their EFL classes.