1. What type of course are you teaching?

I am teaching a group of 14 year-olds in an Argentinian secondary school. Their level of English

knowledge and proficiency is Intermediate. The reason why students learn English is because
it is a subject that they must have approved in the school system; students are expected to
use the English language for general purposes; it is not an intensive course since the number
of meetings is two hours per week.
2. What criteria for selection should you take into account?
The criteria I should take into account to introduce a poem with my students may include the
age of the students, if they are too old to enjoy it or too young; the intellectual maturity of
students, if it is too developed to find the poem challenging or too immature to understand it;
students´ emotional understanding, if it is too developed to find the poem engaging or too
immature to relate to the text; students’ linguistic proficiency and literary background, if they
are too advanced to be challenged by the poem or too elementary to cope with it; also I
should take into account if the students’ interests are(or not) represented in the content of
the poem.
3. In what ways will the students’ cultural background help or hinder their understanding of
the text?
If the cultural background of the students is minimal or non-existent in relation to the poem, it
may hinder their understanding. If the events that occur in the poem are far removed from
their daily lives, it may reduce the students' ability to understand, so the teacher should bear
in mind that he must introduce cultural information from the context of the poem and from
the author to provide students so that they have at least a basic understanding of the poem.
Although students do not have this minimal cultural knowledge in relation to the poem, there
are other factors that help their understanding, for example topics treated in the poem or
human relationships and feelings that can be related to the students´ life. In addition there are
many students who are curious to learn another culture and enjoy studying their literature
because they believe it reveals key ideas about that society.
4. In what ways will the students’ knowledge of literature help or hinder their understanding
of the text?
Students may have a literary background for having studied literature in their own language,
so they can already have a level of literary competence that will help them make sense of a
literary poem even when their linguistic knowledge is limited.
On the other hand, students who have little literary knowledge, but are linguistically
competent, may find themselves understanding each individual word on the page without
being able to make sense of the literary meanings behind the poem. When choosing poem to
use with students I must observe not only the language level in the poem, but also its specific
literary qualities.

5. What other criteria should you take into account?

Other criteria I should you take into account when choosing a literary text:
 Availability of texts:

What kinds of books and texts are available from which I can choose? How easily can I make these
texts available to my students?

 Length of the text:

Do I have enough time available to work on the poem in class? How much time do students have
to work on the poem at home? Could I use only part of a text, or an abridged version of it? If so,
how much background information do I need to give students to make the text intelligible?

• Exploitability:

What kinds of tasks and activities can I devise to exploit the text? Are there resources available to
help me exploit the poem, for example a film of a particular novel the students are studying,
recordings of a play or poem, library materials giving information about the life of an author, etc.?

• Fit with syllabus:

How do the texts link with the rest of the syllabus, thematically or in terms of vocabulary,
grammar or discourse? Can I devise tasks and activities for exploiting the poem which link with the
methodology I have used elsewhere in the syllabus?

6. Consider the three main approaches to using literature in the foreign language classroom
and devise two activities for each approach.

• Language-Based Approach: It focus on analysing the language of literary texts and

the main aim is to helps students make meaningful interpretations of it and for
students to achieve a better understanding of English language.
• Literature as content: It focus on literature as the content of the course, which
involves areas such as history and literary movements (the context of a text).

• Literature for personal enrichment: It focus on encouraging students to draw on their

own personal experiences, feelings, and opinions through literature. The goal of this
approach is to help students become more actively involved with a reflective thinking
in learning English.
7. What information can you provide to help students understand the cultural, social and
historical background of the literary text? How can you help them understand the literary
success of the poems, what activities can you devise for this?

Information I should provide students to help them understand better the poem:

 Biographical information about the author.

• Distinct features of the author's style.
• Genre of the text.
• Relationship of the text to the literary movements of its time.
• Historical, political or social background in which the text was written.

After reading the poems and before beginning to work with the activities above, I am going to ask
the students to reflect on what they understood about the poems. Then I will divide the class into
3 groups and give each group a short article, one explains the biography of the author, the other
explains the relationship of the first poem with Romanticism and the last explains the relationship
of the first poem with the second. The idea is that each group read their article and then comment
in their own words to the other groups the importance of their article in relation to the poems,
and whether or not it helps to better understand the poems.

1. William Blake  biography

William Blake (28 November 1757 – 12 August 1827) was an English poet, painter, and printmaker.
Largely unrecognized during his lifetime, Blake is now considered a seminal figure in the history of
the  poetry  and visual arts of the  Romantic Age.  His visual artistry led 21st-century critic  Jonathan
Jones  to proclaim him "far and away the greatest artist Britain has ever produced". 
Although Blake was considered mad by contemporaries for his  idiosyncratic  views, he is held in high
regard by later critics for his expressiveness and creativity, and for the philosophical and mystical
undercurrents within his work. His paintings and poetry have been characterized as part of the
Romantic Movement.  He was hostile to the  Church of England  (indeed, to almost all forms of
organized religion), Blake was influenced by the ideals and ambitions of
the  French  and  American  revolutions.  The singularity of Blake's work makes him difficult to classify.
 2. Romanticism in Holy Thursday (innocence)

The poem “Holy Thursday,” by William Blake, tells the story of orphan boys going to church in
London on the day of Ascension. In the poem Blake, speaks of nature as good, and human
innocence. These ideas that occur throughout the poem have a major connection to the
Romanticism ideas of nature and people being good things. The first ideal that comes into play is
the importance of the natural world. In Romanticism the natural, rural, world is better than that of
city life. Blake uses phrases like, "white as snow" discussing the way that humans relate to nature.
In the poem, Blake describes the children innocent. This represents the ideal that humans are
naturally good.

3. Paired poems. “Holy Thursday” (Experience)

This is a companion poem to the poem of the same title in the Songs of Innocence. Every year, on
Holy Thursday (Ascension Day), the charity-school children of London took part in a special service
of thanksgiving in St. Paul’s Cathedral in London. Charity Schools were funded by public donations
to care for and educate orphaned and abandoned children in the city. The poem uses an actual
historical circumstance to explore deeper human tendencies and attitudes.

In Holy Thursday “Innocence”, the speaker stressed the innocence of the children and the
benevolence of those who cared for them. He failed to see any negative implications in the scene
and in the treatment of the children. In the “Experience” version, however, the speaker can only
see the negative aspects of the scene: He offers a damning attack on the contemporary approach
to ‘charity’. He has a vision of the appalling contrast between the prosperity of the country and its
toleration of such poverty among children.

8. What information can you provide to help students understand and learn from the
vocabulary, grammar and expressions of the literary text?
Literature may provide a particularly appropriate way of stimulating language acquisition, as it
provides meaningful and memorable contexts for processing and interpreting new language.
What is needed to help students understand and learn from the vocabulary and grammar is a
way of enabling students to reach an aesthetic appreciation of the poem which connects its
specific linguistic features with intuitions about its meanings. One way of doing this is by
making use of stylistics (a method which 'uses the apparatus of linguistic description') to
analyze how meanings in the poem are communicated. Stylistic analysis is a useful way of
revising grammar and vocabulary with students, and increasing their overall language
awareness.
Here are a set of questions to answer while analyzing a poem from a stylistic perspective:
 Does the poem contain some striking irregularities of form in comparison to traditional
poems that are within the same genre?
 How about the poem’s phonological qualities? Are some sounds repeated? Are there
some sounds missing?
 Are there awkward word usage? Does the author use standard language?
 Semantic fields are important while analyzing a poem stylistically. For example, can you
categorize the words in different semantic fields? What kind of feeling do the verbs give?
 By looking at the verbs, do you get the feeling of the past or do they point at an ongoing
activity?
 In conclusion, are the linguistic features of the poem directly related to the overall or
particular meanings reached?

9. How can you encourage students to participate in discussions and to express their ideas and
opinions?
To encourage students to participate in discussions and to express their opinions I can ask
students to free-associate/brainstorm around the central theme or title of the poem
before they read it. I can provide students with a questionnaire about some of the issues
or situations raised in the poem, and ask them to discuss their own views or responses to
the questions before or after reading the poem. I can ask students to imagine that they
themselves are certain characters in a poem. What would they do in the situation of the
characters? Also, I can provide learners with a guided fantasy linked to the setting of the
poem. Students are told to close their eyes and imagine the noises, sights, sounds,
feelings, etc. that they might experience in that setting.

10. Can you use any audio-visual material to help students understand and enjoy the poems?
(E.g. YouTube, internet resources, etc.)

• Poems’ genre worksheet: It is important for students to know the author's socio-historical
context, for which I found an internet page that explains Romanticism very well with a
vocabulary that captures the attention of students with short and interesting explanations.

https://whyweread.com/materials/22/Romanticism.pdf

• This video shows an analysis of the life of William Blake in a way that encourages students
to think and put themselves in his place, in the context that he lived and the influence he
left for future generations.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hx3o6yfFX6g