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Date Posted: 14:08:19 07/27/03 Sun
Author: Lidane Luiza da Cunha
Subject: Task 13

Task 13:
Material Develpment:
This activity is designed to high intermediate students and the purpose is to develop their reading skills through poetry and to motivate them to write poems.
In the previous class teacher may ask student to research what a poem is. How different it is from an advertisement, a journalistic text, or from the other texts they have written in class. They can research it either in a library or on Internet.
For this activity, teacher may select some poems which cannot be too dense neither difficult to understand. Romantic poems do not have a very difficult structure to understand, but they may be too dense, take a long time to read, and the old vocabulary may be hard for students. Modern poems are not dense and the vocabulary is more common, so they are easier to be used. Some of them are short (such as haiku) and interesting and may provide new vocabularies and up-to dated colloquial expressions. The activity consists on two parts (that can be divided into two classes): a pre-activity to collect and share information about poetry and use it to interpret poems in class, and the second, in order to process this information through a task, they are asked to write their own poems.
Pre-activity:
1. In pairs students are demanded to choose one poem, but everyone must have all the poems.
2. For skimming, students are demanded to analyze the poem paying attention on the differences between it and the other texts, that is, the research they have done at home. They are likely to find that there is rhyme, it is written in lines, there is no sentence and punctuation like other texts, etc.
3. In order to scan the poems, teacher may orient them to read it and find out the subject developed throughout the poem, who might be the speaker, the occasion, the setting. The pairs can also speculate about purpose of the poem.
4. Next, teacher may, if she/he wants to enrich students' reading or if one students mention it in class, explain some important figures of speech to analyze the poems such as paradox, metaphors, comparison, similes, but a very general explanation of them. But she/he cannot give examples from the poems, which students are going to analyze later.
5. If the teacher gives this previous information, the pairs can find these figures in the poems and discuss the meaning of them.
6. Finally, they present their poems and everything they understood from it. Students have to tell their classmates why that is not a narrative, and what a poem usually have. As everyone in class has all the poems, but each pair has only discussed one (information gap), they may skim all poems before the presentations and help them to analyze and discuss their classmate's interpretation.

Activity:
1. Each student can chose a type of a poem they liked most to write their owns. In pairs, they discuss all information they have had of what a poem is and use it to decide their model and subject of the poem (it can be about anything they like, but teacher may give them some themes or ask them to write about the subject of the poems presented). Teacher may motivate them to help each other by giving opinion and suggestion.
2. Each pair writes a draft. They share their small poems and do peer-edition. In this interaction, teacher asks them to discuss about what they understood from each one's poem and the other may justify why he/she used that subject and intended to say, etc.
3. Teacher gives last feedback on language structure and vocabulary, if necessary.
4. Publishing: teacher may collect the final draft of the poems and put them on the board so that everyone may read their classmates' task and discuss the meaning of the poems (this may be for next class)
According to Littlewood, this activity may be classified as Communicative activity because students are using "real language" to share information and also to process information. By doing research at home and then analyzing the poems in class with this information, they are sharing it. One student may provide the other important ideas to interpret the poem that the other does not know. They are also sharing information that lacks (information gap) when everyone learns with the poems they have but only their classmates analyzed; besides, they may respond by giving opinions and discussing these poems. By writing and sharing suggestions in order to write a poem and using the previous information they had in their reading activities, students are sharing information with unrestricted cooperation, because they are interacting to solve a problem, which is a writing activity. In this whole-task, students may practice several communicative skills (reading thoroughly, critical reading, speaking, writing, etc) with a context and a motivating purpose (understanding and writing a poem) for a still wider range of communicative functions. Besides, this activity increases opportunities not only for a collective interaction, but it also allows learners to express their own individuality in the discussion, in this case, their interpretations shared with their classmates. I believe that it does provide the use of language of a functional communicative activity that Littlewood explains.

Reference:
Littlewood, W. Communicative language teaching.Cambridge: Cambridge Univeristy Press, 1981. p. 16 - 42.

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