Citylife

Lesson

	level	Skill	Age	Time
	Int+	Reading: Take me home	Adults / YL	90

The lesson includes an poem and a song on the topic of urban migration.

Click on the links above to get straight to the lesson, what follows is my thought process in putting the lesson together

Why I designed this class

Using Poetry in the English Classroom

There are some subjects that have universal appeal and pretty much guarantee a decent class. A list of these subjects would include, among others, youth, old age, marriage, birth, love, education, and friendship. Not surprisingly, these are also the inspiration for a great deal of music and poetry. Something that I’ve found works really well in class is taking a poem and song on the same subject and exploring the differences between them.

One of the first times that I did this was with the poem “If” by Rudyard Kipling and the song “Father and son” by Cat Stevens. Both deal with the subject of parenthood but they have radically different takes on the subject. The poem is written from a very typically British stiff-upper-lip perspective whereas the song is much more touchy-feely and concerned with the emotional connection between the protagonists. I quite like the stiff-upper-lip approach personally but my students didn’t agree and there was a lot of scope for discussion and utilisation of the texts.

I recently revisited this approach as I discovered Myanmar, where I am currently teaching, has some really great poetry that has been translated into English. What surprised me was that a lot of the language was relatively straightforward and accessible for even lower level learners. The lesson that I put together was about moving to the city.

The class presents a poem called ‘Greater Coucals’ by local poet Mya Kabyar and invites students to compare its perspective on migration with that of John Denver in his song ‘Take me home, Country Roads’. In researching the lesson, I came across this brilliant article by Brian Tomlinson on using poetry in the classroom. I found myself agreeing with pretty much all of it and it expresses it in a much better way than I could. I throughly reccommend it for anyone looking to use poetry in the EFL classroom.

Further reading

	Author	Title
	Brian Tomlinson	Using Poetry