Anticipating Student

Problems / Further tasks and

activities
• What can be the anticipating
problems?

• 1 The background to the poem

• 2 The language of the poem
• 3 Motivating and involving students
• 1. The background to the poem

• - Any cultural or historical information?

• - The collection from which the poem is taken?
• - The author's life or other works?
• - What genre the poem is or to what literary
movement it belongs?
• 2. The language of the poem

• - Any unfamiliar words, phrases, grammatical

constructions or syntactic features?
• - Any important discoursal or formal features of the
poem?
• - Any ambiguities in meaning?
• - Any figurative or symbolic meanings?
• - Any aural or musical qualities in the poem?
3. Motivating and involving students
• - How can the theme or topic of the poem be made
relevant to the student's own experience?

• - How does the use of a poem in class mesh with the

requirements of the syllabus and the students' perceptions
of their own needs? Can the poem be exploited in such a
way that both of these demands are met?

• - What activities will most suit the learning styles of the

students?
 Further tasks and activities

While – Further
Pre - reading Post - reading
reading Follow – up
• What tasks and activities related to
poem can the teacher use in the
classroom??
1- Pre-reading activities:
STIMULATING STUDENT INTEREST IN THE TEXT
• 1. Students predict the theme of the poem from its title or a few
key words or phrases in the poem.
• 2. Students or groups of students are given different lines from
the poem and asked to suggest the subject or theme of the poem.

Pre - reading
Sample activity:
PROVIDING THE NECESSARY HISTORICAL
OR CULTURAL BACKGROUND
• 1. Students read or listen to a text which describes the
historical or cultural background to the poem.
• 2. Students read or listen to a text about the author's life
which may deepen their understanding of the themes of
the poem.
• 3. Students discuss what are appropriate behaviours or
feelings in their culture or society in a particular situation.
• 4. More literary-minded students could be given
information about the genre of the poem or the literary
movement to which the author belongs before reading it.
HELPING STUDENTS WITH THE LANGUAGE OF
THE POEM
1. To guide students towards an understanding of more
metaphorical or symbolic meanings in the poem, students could be
asked to free associate round some of those words in the poem
which carry powerful symbolic connotations.

• 2. The teacher pre teaches any important words, phrases or

grammatical constructions that appear in the poem.
 While –
reading
While-reading activities
• 1. Students are given a jumbled version of the and asked to put it
together again. Jumbling up verses works particularly well for poems
with a strong narrative, for example ballads.
• 2. Certain words are removed from the poem, and students have to fill
in the gaps - either by themselves or using a list of words provided.
• 3. Students read only one verse at a time and then try to predict what's
coming next - this works well with narrative poems.
Post-reading activities:
HELPING STUDENTS TOWARDS AN Post - reading
INTERPRETATION OF THE POEM
• 1. Students are given a series of statements about the possible
underlying meanings of the poem, and they decide which ones are
true or false.
• 2. Students are given two or three brief interpretations of a poem
(possibly from critics) and they decide which one they think is the
most plausible or appropriate.
• 3. If a poem is written in rather archaic language, students are
asked to compare this to two versions of it in modern English -
which version best captures the meaning and tone of the poem?
FURTHER FOLLOW-UP ACTIVITIES
• 1. Students rewrite the poem as a different form of discourse.
This works particularly well with ballads or narrative poems -
students either rewrite the story as if it were a newspaper
article or the script for a soap opera.
• 2. Students read and discuss other poems by the same author,
or other poems on the same theme.
• 3. Students write their own poem, using the original as a
model

Further
Follow – up