Poetry in the English Class-room

Seminar paper from the year 2007 in the subject English - Pedagogy, Didactics, Literature Studies, grade: 1,8, Hamburg University of Technology, language: English, abstract: In the seminar dealing with poetry in language education we decided to investigate contemporary students' attitude towards poetry, furthermore their experiences with poetry in school. The most appropriate way to achieve reasonable results to this question seemed to be a questionnaire, which we planned to hand in in class and analyze later on at home. With regard to a useful target group we finally decided to deal with a grammar school's senior class, close to university campus in a wealthy district of Hamburg and with a strong probability of a high educational level in the family background. In an area with such conditions we assumed to find students that had come in touch with poetry more often than students with a less sophisticated background. Beginning with developing a research design, the main research question and the questionnaire, we aimed at the students' personal interest in poetry, their experiences with poetry in their leisure time and their poetry experiences during English classes. The core of our project lies in the verification or falsification of a thesis by Hans Magnus Enzensberger, containing that most students' experiences with poetry at school, especially the way poetry is taught at school, have a demotivating effect on the students' general attitude towards poetry.