I like literature and poetry, but honestly don’t have a lot of experience using it with English language learners. (My colleague Ayesha Mushtaq, on the other hand, has a great method for using fairy tales to teach critical reading in EAP. Cool stuff! I wish some of her talks were online…)

In doing some house-cleaning of some old teaching materials, however, I recently came across an activity I had made a while ago focused around imagist poetry. The lesson includes a definition of what imagism is, a few of my favourite imagist poems, and then finished with students writing their own. Imagist poems are so clear and straightforward that I think this lesson could work with students B1 and up.

I’ve only ever used this activity once, with a group of B2+ EAP students, and the poems they produced were fantastic, ranging from the mundane to intensely romantic. Those students whose cultural background includes a strong poetic tradition  of long, epic ballads freaked out a bit initially at the simplicity of the poems on this worksheet. I assured them that we do have other types of poetry in English (and encouraged them to check them out…)

Enjoy!

Imagism_ESL (.docx file)