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“Just Pour your Feelings onto Paper!”
Successful Strategies for Promoting
Students’ Love of Poetry
and English Language Learning
Vida Zuljevic
In preparation for teaching writing to a Russian bilingual class of third, fourth, and fifth graders a few years ago, I remembered that my first experiences with the English language were nursery rhymes and traditional children’s songs—my first encounter with poetry in English. I had learned these at the time I got my first job, at a preschool academy in Dallas, Texas, after moving to the US from my native Bosnia and Herzegovina during the war. My love for poetry, combined with a love for puppetry and music, were such powerful tools in my own language learning that I saw them as keys with which I would certainly “open the doors to my students’ feelings, their imaginations, and their voices” (Heard, 1998, p.3). Poetry seems able to ease the first encounters with a second language. It alleviates a child’s fears of not being able to read or write in that language. Its appearance on the page is friendly, and if the words rhyme, if they are funny, if there is music in these words, they stay with the child as friendly reminders of his or her first “I-can-read-in-English” experiences.
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"Just Pour your Feelings onto Paper!"