Techno-poesy: Blending Technology in the Teaching of Poetry

Sujith. S

School Teacher & Research Student

Pantheerankave High School, Calicut, India

In ancient times, the Irish believed that any knowledge or rule of law that did not pass through the heart was dangerous; only poets were allowed to be their teachers and kings. The reverence for verse in Ireland was such that some believed certain words to be so powerful that they could be used only by poets, a notion that has remained steadfast as adults and students alike regard the writing of poetry to be a challenge beyond them, something reserved for the elite. Even reading poetry falls into disfavour as students get older. (Morgan, 1994)

Myth and Reality

The myth of the ancient Irish people cited continues to a certain extent to exercise a sort of tyranny over the generations of teachers destined to teach poetry as if they were ushered in a realm of experience where there have no special role to play, and even if they assume any role of introducing poetry to the aspiring learners, a fear of the unknown and the ununderstandable reigns supreme in the deep recess of their cerebral world. This fear of impotency when deputed to teach poetry steals away a great deal of pleasure and is replaced by a psychological pressure converting the classroom into a disoriented place where both the teachers and students fail beyond any scope of meaningful repair.

Technology and Literature

Technology was believed to be and is still considered to be quite antagonistic to anything that is poetic. The marriage between poetry and technology is said to be unethical, anaesthetic and unnatural. The emergence of new forms of expression in popular culture, and the displacement of reading literature in general and poetry in particular from the ecology of the learner’s reading habits by immense viewing television and other visual media, has meant that young people may be exposed to less literary writing, and read little or no literature outside the formal environment of the school classrooms. The responsibility of the new generation of teachers of poetry is to save poetry through conceiving and designing a much more scientific and practical method by which they can take the learners back to the luminous world of poetic experience. This is easier to be said than done. The bygone teaching style and approach to teaching poetry will certainly be a fruit less exercise before a mass of students who are addicted to technological gadgets.

Teaching with Technology

It is clear that computer technology is here to stay. It is all around us. It has entered our daily personal and professional lives through word processing, e-mail, online libraries, and the Web. We are all using it to varying extents, not because anyone forces us to, but because we have discovered that it is valuable in many areas of our professional life—in facilitating our writing, our research, our communication with colleagues worldwide. It seems, though we are very comfortable with these private uses, we are not with professional use i.e. in the classrooms. Before we can do so, however, several things need to happen. Teachers need to become autonomous in their use of technology. Teachers need to understand how different technologies work, what purpose they serve, and how they can best be used. We need to realize that there are many different types of softwares, to understand what the softwares are designed for, and to discover the underlying pedagogical intent.

It is important to view technology not as a panacea but as a tool. Technology will not replace other tools, such as the pencil, the textbook, or the blackboard. Nor will any one technology replace all others, since no single tool can serve all functions. What matters most is to use each technology for its best features, to exploit its specificity.

Learners the Ultimate e-Gurus

Our students come to school with literacy experiences and skills that remain largely untapped in the classroom setting. They are accustomed to reading texts that combine image, sound, and words, which are often found in digital spaces that are bound up in social practices. Consider how many hours students log on Orkut, Facebook, YouTube or Twitter. How might we help our students further develop their visual and digital literacy skills to think more critically about how images, sounds, and print text work together to communicate meaning?

Poetry is meant to be lifted from the printed page and explored in multi-modal ways like pictures, motion pictures, paintings, audio clips etc. The use of new digital media for reading, writing, and representing poetry encourages an exploration of the relationship between text and image and how images and sound might be used to mediate meaning-making. New media have an immersive and performative potential that encourages students to get inside a poem and play with it. Giving students opportunities to create poems or respond to and annotate existing poems using new media provides them with opportunities to use the technology in meaningful ways.

The Kerala Experience

Now let me relate the situation in the state of Kerala, where there are a lot of innovative experiments in the field of teaching/learning process are taking place. There have always had encouraging results with many of these new experiments. But as seen anywhere, the response of the majority of English teaching fraternity was not always exciting or encouraging. A psychological resistance to accept or adopt anything new could conspicuously be seen with silent protest and meaningless mumbling in the intramural squares of the educational institutions. Sane voice from devotionally committed teachers with the pedantic knowledge of the latest developments in the teaching/learning process professed and practised across the globe could not alleviate the anchoring doubts conquering the less interested in the innovative methods.

The emerging radical ideas as to the teaching/learning process were grossly and deliberately tarred and re-tarred by a section of the teaching community right from the commencement of the implementation of the various programmes such as Cluster Training. Cluster Training is a common platform for teachers from five or eight schools in a locality where they come together to share their first hand experience with the implementation of the methods in the classrooms. These types of monthly get-together of the teachers of different faculties sit subject-wise in the place as declared in advance by the authorities concerned across the state. Though the programme has been well appreciated by the teachers and well wishers at the beginning, the sheen of the same was seen gradually getting dimmed. The excitement was soon replaced by boredom and ennui; may be due to nothing new and original about the style of functioning of such cluster level meetings or by the threatening voice of the authorities that made the teachers antagonistic and immune to such programmes. Sharing of experience gradually became a botheration and a restless activity for many imaginative minds and the less interested were soon found coming to the cluster programmes for the fear of the authority and not for expanding and broadening and deepening their own perspective. In many of these cluster level meetings I have noticed a common phenomenon with most of the teachers of English to seek an escape from any demanding debate on teaching poetry. Most of the teachers feel that motivating learners to read poems is an immense task. But the same teachers when they were introduced to teaching poetry with the help of the hypertext using computers were greatly excited. The discussion in one of such fruitful cluster meeting was to integrate information technology in the field of teaching English. Using multimedia softwares and other such programmes in the teaching could be a costly affair. So, the talks were focussed on using commonly available softwares and creating a kind of multimedia text that would inspire the learners to read, understand and recreate the theme in some other expressions using the latest technology. It was through such dialogues the use of hyper linking came into the fore. Hyper linking allows a teacher create a text that would retain the learners interest in exploring new knowledge by using computers. At this point let us discuss the technical things such as hypertext, hyperlink and the like and how they are used to create hypertext poetry.

What is Hypertext?

Hypertext is text displayed on a computer or other electronic device with references (hyperlinks) to other text that the reader can immediately access, usually by a mouse click or key press sequence. Apart from running text, hypertext may contain tables, images and other presentational devices. Hypertext is the underlying concept defining the structure of the World Wide Web, making it an easy-to-use and flexible format to share information over the Internet. And a hyperlink is a graphic or a piece of text in an Internet document that can connect readers to another webpage, or another portion of a document. Web users will usually find at least one hyperlink on every webpage. The simplest form of these is called embedded text or an embedded link. In this instance, a hyperlink will show up as a single word or group of words that will usually be marked as underlined, and are frequently blue in colour. Clicking on the hyperlink may take one to another part of the page, or it may open another Internet page.

Hypertext Poetry

Hypertext Poetry is poetry that has had hyperlinks embedded into it by the reader. I learners select a poem and then they add hyperlinks to the poem to help explain their interpretation of the poem. The hyperlinks can link to pictures, words, other poems, and any allusion the line or group of words in the poem brings to the reader's mind.

How can we hyperlink a word?

Select the word in the poem/text you want to hyperlink

Next right click the mouse and click hyperlink.

Then, show the path to the file with which the word is to be linked. Here it is a word file named ‘Plane Trees’ that shown the meaning of the word and its image.

Once you have linked the word with the other file the word will turn to blue in colour and underlined as follows.

Once you click on the hyperlinked word it takes you to the file you have already linked with.

The file that is linked here is given below.

References:

Morgan, C. (1994). Creative writing in foreign language teaching. Language Learning Journal, 10, 44-47.

Useful Websites

1. http://vozme.com converting text to mp3 format
2. www.thepaperboy.com newspapers
3. www.newseum.org newspapers
4. http://in.babelfish.com for translating text from English and other languages
5. www.finervista.com web based seminars(webinar)
6. http://webcast.berkeley.edu podcast
7. www.livejournal.com journals
8. http://en.wikipedia.org encyclopedia
9. www.savevid.com video downloader
10. www.softwarecasa.com/snagit.html video capturing
11. www.livemocha.com spoken English
12. http://thelibrary.org online library
13. www.gutenberg.org e-books
14. www.lol.com jokes
15. http://liveresearch.net research article
16. www.anecdotage.com anecdotes
17. www.kantalk.com spoken English
18. www.webferret.com multiple search software
19. www.copernic.com multiple search
20. http://audacity.sourceforge.net audio recording
21. http://howtoimprovereadingcomprehension.com reading
22. http://www.ted.com speeches
23. http://www.vaestro.com webinars
24. http://www.onelook.com reverse dictionary
25. http://www.askoxford.com oxford dictionary
26. http://www.glossarist.com all terms
27. http://www.questia.com on line library
28. http://www.grammarbook.com grammar and usage
29. http://www.libdex.com Libraries
30. http://www.poemhunter.com poems
31. http://famouspoetsandpoems.com poems
32. http://www.eric.ed.gov educational research
33. http://www.scribd.com e books
34. http://www.classicshorts.com short stories
35. http://www.world-english.org essays
36. http://www.essay.org essays
37. http://www.freeessays.cc essays
38. www.oilpaintingsonline.com paintings
39. www.artabus.com art
40. http://www.artbabyart.com art

41. www.yourdictionary.com/grammarrules/index.html

42. www.galeresearch.com research

43. www.hibeamresearch.com

44. www.ipl.org

45. www.visualthesaurus.com thesaurus

46. www.podcastdirectory.com podcast

The Teaching of Poetry at the Secondary Level: a Stylistic Approach

Sujith.S,

School Teacher and Research Student,

Pantheerankave High School, Calicut.

‘It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearance. The mystery of the world is the visible, not invisible.’ -Oscar Wilde.

One of the major criticisms of the conventional way of teaching poetry at the secondary level is that it affords very little scope for the students to do anything but listen in the classroom. In most of the classes where poem is taught, the students remain passive listeners and occasionally they answer the questions aired by the teacher. The usual procedure of teaching poem will be by giving a short account on the poet, the period she lived, the common images she uses, and thus establishing the ‘brand label’ given to her by tons of critics or teachers. This is normally done either at the beginning of the class or at the end of the discussion. Most of the time the learners are baffled, when they start reading a poem by themselves. The main reason is the lack of a workable ‘tool’ that can be used to enter the poem, to analyse it, to understand and to interpret it. Stylistics offers such a viable tool that can be used to analyse a poem objectively.

Given an awareness of literature as discourse, we must examine the potential uses of literary texts together with methodological approaches for their presentation. Stylistics is such an approach. This paper attempts an enquiry into the use of stylistics in the teaching of poem at the secondary level.

What is Stylistics?

Stylistics is a critical approach which uses the methods and findings of the science of linguistics in the analysis of literary texts. By ‘linguistics’ it is meant here the scientific study of language and its structures rather than the learning of individual languages. It might be objected at this point that it is impossible to adopt the stylistic approach in the teaching of poetry since the learners at the secondary level do not study linguistics at all. Then how can we tackle this problem?

We could introduce the concepts of the basic tools that are used by stylisticians to the learners. One need not worry much whether the learner can understand the concepts as most of the devices used by linguists and stylisticians appeal to common sense. It is also noteworthy that the new curriculum revision at the secondary level in Kerala familiarises the learners the basic rudiments of linguistics in the teaching of grammar. Perhaps the easiest way to introduce the stylistic approach to the study of poetry is through the concept of ‘foregrounding’.

Foregrounding:

‘A painting that is representational does not simply reproduce the visual stimuli an observer would receive if he were looking at the scene it depicts: what is artistically interesting is how it deviates from photographic accuracy, from simply being a copy of nature.’ (Geoffrey Leech 1968)

If we assume that poetic language is in some way or some sense different form ordinary language, then we could say ordinary language is the background against which poetic language is foregrounded. For familiarising this concept to the learners we could use popular advertisements in the newspapers. We could sensitise how the companies project their products in the backdrop of other things.

Foregrounding has often been equated with linguistic deviation. Let’s discuss some of the common deviations employed by writers.

Lexical Deviation:

Neologism, or the invention of new ‘words’ is the more obvious ways in which a poet may exceed the normal resources of the language. We can call new words ‘Nonce-Formation’ if they are made up for a single occasion only. The most common processes of word-formation are affixation. In the following phrase from Hopkins’s The Wreck of the Deutschland both compounding and affixation are used to similar effect:

the widow-making unchilding unfathering deeps.

The privative use of the prefix un- here in the sense of ‘take off/away from’ can be paralleled in unhorse, unleash etc. the cognitive meaning of the above given line could be ‘The deeps which deprive (wives) of husbands, (children) of fathers, and (parents) of children.’

Grammatical Deviation:

The most obvious example of this is the situation where the poet breaks the rules of the language in order to create new meanings or effects. A good example is the phrase used by Dylan Thomas: a grief ago. This phrase breaks two rules in English.

1. The determiner ‘a’ goes before a countable noun. Here it is used before an uncountable noun, ‘grief’

2. The post modifying adverb ago would normally be able to modify a noun to do with Time. Grief, on the other hand is a word to do with emotion.

The fact that ‘a grief ago’ is linguistically deviant has a very important psychological consequence for a reader, though it violates the deep structure of the language.

Graphological Deviation:

This is the easiest thing we can notice. This includes the deviation of both spelling and punctuation. Let’s take a short poem of Cummings.

seeker of truth

follow no path

all paths lead where

truth is here

Here an ambiguity arises from a clash between the unit of sense indicated by lineation (line arrangement) and by syntax. According to lineation, the poem ends with a statement ‘truth is here’; but according to syntax, ‘truth is’ must belong to the clause begun in the previous line, and so ‘here’ is left on its own as exclamatory conclusion. The whole significance of the poem lies in this ambiguity, which of course could not have arisen if the poet had used conventional capitalization and punctuation.

Other Techniques:

Parallelism: Foregrounding is not only promoted by breaking linguistic rules. The other possibility is that of parallelism, where some linguistic feature vary, while others are held constant. The well known example of parallelism will be from Othello:

‘I kissed thee ere I killed thee’

The line consists of two clauses linked by ‘ere’. The two clauses have the same structure, SVO – SVO. Even the conjunction ‘ere’ is a spelling palindrome.

Repetition: Language allows for a great abundance of types of lexical and grammatical repetition. The ‘farewell’ speech of Othello contains verbal repetition.

Farewell the tranquil mind!

farewell content!

Farewell the plumed troop and the big wars

that make ambition virtue!

O, farewell!

Interpretations of Parallelism and Repetition:

‘Linguistic parallelism is very often connected with rhetorical emphasis and memorability. In nursery rhymes and ballads, it affords an art-less kind of pleasure in itself, and probably needs no further justification.’ (Geoffrey Leech, 1968)

People generally feel that if a parallelism or repetition occurs in a poem, some deeper motive or justification for it should be sought.

How does stylistics differ from close reading?

Stylistic analysis attempts an objective study based on concrete quantifiable data and applied in a systematic way. The standard close reading is often seemed to be impressionistic and intuitive in nature.

‘Learner’s intuitions about the language maybe be different from those of native speakers’ because of different linguistic, cultural and literary backgrounds (Lazar 1993)

Close reading tends to isolate the literary text and see it a purely aesthetic art object. Stylistic by contrast emphasises the connections between literary language and everyday language. The aim of stylistics in a broader sense is ‘demystification’ of both literature and criticism.

‘Stylistic analysis shows how what is said is said and how

meanings are made’ (Brumfit and Carter 1986)

The linguistic organisation of the text cannot be ignored for it creates a firm basis from which students can proceed to make sense of the text and construct its meaning.

What does stylistics focus?

When we do a stylistic analysis of a piece of literature, we tend to look at certain things closely. The main focus will be to the ‘linguistic choices’ a writer makes. The choices could be between one word and another, one structure and another. Examination of the choices that the writer makes can help us understand the meaning she is trying to state. When the choice she makes is from outside the established language system, the choice become deviant and thus produces foregrounding. Over regularity of a particular choice within the system (parallelism, repetition) also produces foregrounding. Close examination of how deviation and parallelism works can help us understand meaning.

Process of applying stylistic analysis in classrooms:

Now the question could be how to incorporate these ‘tools’ in the classrooms. Let’s look at a poem discussed by Widdowson in his book ‘Stylistics and Teaching of Literature’ He has taken a small poem by Robert Frost titled ‘Dust of Snow’

DUST OF SNOW

The way a crow

Shook down on me

The dust of snow

From a hemlock tree

Has given my heart

A change of mood

And saved some part

Of a day I had rued.

-Robert Frost

This poem consists of a single sentence. There is no apparent deviation in the poem. But the poem is foregrounded as it is complete in one sentence. The lexical items do take a unique value in association with each other. The choice of the lexical items has to be focused.

The predominant words in the first stanza are ‘crow’, ‘dust’, ‘snow’, and ‘hemlock tree’. The crow that feeds on corpses and garbage is considered as bad omen. The hemlock tree, a kind of North American pine is considered as poisonous. The words dust and snow brings to our mind lifelessness. The value of the item dust now becomes clear as the one which it has in the phrase in the burial service.

Genesis: ‘For dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.’

All these features are associated with death. The association of these lexical items in this context has the effect of activating those semantic features in their signification which have a common point of reference.

Once this basic association is made, one can go on to impose a more specific interpretation on the poem. We could say that the crow is a black-frocked priest scattering dust on a coffin. The thought of unexpected death and the transience of life make us enjoy the ‘rued life’.

How could we get the learners recognise the association between crow, dust, snow and hemlock tree?

• The learners could be asked to note down as many details about the meanings of these words as possible. They could use a dictionary, if necessary.
• They could also be encouraged to write down the connotative and denotative details.

The learners’ finding could be some thing like the following sort:

Crow: bird organic ugly

animate noisy

winged bird of ill omen

black feeds on dead and decomposing flesh

Dust: inorganic dirty

inanimate particles of matter

dry remains of the dead

Snow: inorganic winter

inanimate frozen vapor

Hemlock tree: tree organic

inanimate poisonous

• Let the learners find out the words which have more or less the same details.
• Let them associate the action in the first stanza with the same in the second stanza.
• The learners could, I hope, be now able to associate the words and interpret the poem.

References

Brumfit, C. J. and Carter, R. A. (1986), Literature and Language Teaching, Oxford: O.U.P.

Lazar, Gillian. (1993), Literature and Language Teaching, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Leech, Geoffrey N. (1968), A Linguistic Guide to English Poetry, London: Longman.

Short, Michael (1983), 'Stylistics and the Teaching of Literature'

Widdowson, H. G. (1975), Stylistics and the Teaching of Literature, London: Longman.