This paper explores a suite of close writing practices and exercises that ask students to attend closely to language at the level of morpheme, word, line, sentence, or stanza. Close writing aims to move students beyond a conception of reading as mere transaction and technology, while pushing writing pedagogy beyond the development of expository…

Having opportunities to write about their cultures and identities validates and engages students of English as a second language (ESL) by giving them a voice and a platform to promote ideas and values that the dominant society may marginalize (Christensen, 2000; Cummins, 2001; Cummins & Early, 2011). Identity-based pedagogies, however, tend to…

This article describes the author's attempt to convince her students that poetry can be "their thing," and also show them how much it can shape the way they think about the world and their place in it. In this article Melissa Ladenheim describes the technique known as "newspaper blackout" poetry. The exciting thing about this…

This article describes a pedagogical project designed to optimize opportunities for individual, creative expression in L2 academic writing. Conducted in four EFL Composition classes in a university in mainland China, a writing project using poetry as a research methodology, first introduced by Hanauer (2010), was implemented and assessed for…

This empirical study examined the perceptions and experiences of nine Thai college student writers' expression of emotions in poetry, narrative, and opinionated writing written in their first (L1) and second (L2) languages: Thai and English. The study focused on the participants' perspectives in order to gain more understanding of the phenomenon…

This paper examines the place of poetry writing in the post-16 English curriculum in Malta. In presenting the results of a small-scale study adopting a mixed methods approach, it explores the views of teachers, students and an influential examiner. The paper proposes that while there seems to be an appreciation of what creative writing can…

The Poetry Generating Loop is a new kind of generative writing circle that offers concrete, creative ways to get students involved in and excited about poetry. By writing poems in groups, students are able to learn poetic terms and experiment with techniques through their writing--a process that can shed new light on the world of poetry. (Contains…