This is a free British Council course. It’s different from the graded reader course as it includes poetry and how to exploit literature to work on all four skills. There wasn’t much that was new to me but I got some good example texts to use.
Category Archives: poetry
Poems for Business Classes
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One common question asked throughout Adrian Underhill’s course was how could we adapt the activities for our more serious courses, the ones whose students tend to have very particular and definite aims in mind, such as Business English courses?
Poetry Festival
Today we finished Adrian Underhill’s two-week course, ‘Pronunciation, Performance and Poetry‘. Everyone had a poem they’d chosen and had been working on over the last week, crafting the stress, pauses and intonation. One student, Lauretta, made a poster, found a performance background image and compered the event. Everyone performed. It was a beautiful way to finish the course. Continue reading
The Inner Voice
This phrase has come up a few times recently in different contexts and it’s one I’m interested in: a language teacher, you’d be forgiven for presuming, would tend to concentrate on the ‘outer’ voice. Continue reading
This is just to say… William Carlos Williams
This Is Just To Say
the plums
that were in
the icebox
and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast
Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold
Performance: Humanizing the Classroom
On this course with Adrian Underhill we are preparing a poetry festival for the last class. Each day we start each session with a poem read by Adrian or another student.
I confess when I first read this on the course description I was a little wary. I love poetry but was unsure about its place in the classroom. It appeared to me perhaps as a bit of a throwback to those 70s EFL texts I was so obsessed with when I started out as an idealistic 19 year old – Mario Rinvolucri, Pilgrim’s, NLP in the classroom etc. All these years on I guess I’ve become more cynical and jaded.