This paper outlines a poetry program for fifth grade students that was intended to help children increase their awareness of their environment, bring order to their own experiences, and increase their sensitivity to the physical base of language. To measure change in the children's use of figurative language in prose writing, each child was asked…

The earliest recorded Chinese literature that has survived consists of folk songs mixed with verses and rhymes. Two factors determined the general pattern of subsequent development in Chinese literature: the nature of the written Chinese language and the establishment of the Confucian school as the orthodoxy in literary criticism. By 1800 there…

This paper examines the patterns of sound and silence in several poems to show that teaching poetry is helping students to discover how poetry works instead of discussing what individual poems "mean." When teachers urge students to examine the forms and structures within a poem, they enable students to participate with that poem, combining…

Described are activities used in an interdisciplinary arts program with moderately and severely/profoundly mentally retarded, perceptually impaired, emotionally disturbed, and physically handicapped students. Objectives and procedures are discussed for activities dealing with bodies (including body tracing), visual and poetic circles, textures,…

Notes that, in recent years, the image of Black Women in Afro-American poetry has become more autobiographical and that categories used images of white women -- i.e. formlessness, passivity, instability, confinement, the shrew, and the witch, and others -- are mostly not appropriate to Afro-American images of black women because they are rarely…

This article expresses the need in foreign language instruction to narrow the gap between the study of literature and language studies. It suggests presenting literature not only in the written form, but by means of other semiotic systems. The literature specifically dealt with is that of the song-poem. (CLK)

Noting that his book, "Understanding the New Black Poetry" (Morrow 1973), attempted to sketch a critical framework which would help make the poetry accessible to a larger number of people, the author examines some questions raised there which need some systematic response. (Author/JM)

One approach to introducing students to poetry is to have them write and analyze their own poems. Although this approach has some disadvantages, it does serve to tap students' experiences and expressive potential with creative projects and to give them an immediate and direct relationship with the traditional published works. By writing poems…

Dreams can be used to draw students into an authentic expression of their creativity and to give them some validation for what they are as persons. A "dream seminar" in a writing course could have students read and discuss Whitman's "Leaves of Grass"; log, report, and discuss their dreams during the course; and explore other…

This report on the role of the arts in progressive and experimental education suggests that, despite certain notable exceptions, alternative schools have traded the old formalism for a new disorder that is unfriendly to some (though not all) elements of successful arts instruction: critical self-consciousness, periodic solitude, and stringent…

College freshmen often misread poetry because they cannot read precisely, because the culture and the teachers stereotype poetry as cryptic frill, or because they underread the poem's complexity of response. These problems can be surmounted by using a facets approach to discover the meaning of a poem. Facets illuminate the fact that various poems…

The theme of this issue of the "Connecticut English Journal" is poetry instruction. Numerous ideas, examples, programs, and resources are offered to help students and teachers learn to read, analyze, write, and enjoy poems. The 28 articles and poems provide interpretations of what poetry is, ideas for publishing student writing, strategies for…

THESE TWO TESTS--"TWENTIETH CENTURY LYRICS" AND "SCIENCE AND POETRY"--WERE DESIGNED BY THE OREGON CURRICULUM STUDY CENTER FOR A 10TH-GRADE LITERATURE CURRICULUM. THEY ARE INTENDED TO ACCOMPANY CURRICULUM UNITS AVAILABLE AS ED 010 819 AND ED 010 820. (MM)