You and your students might already enjoy reading and listening to poetry in your own language and perhaps in English too. Poems are, after all, authentic texts. This is a great motivator. Poems are often rich in cultural references, and they present a wide range of learning opportunities. For me, the aim is to teach English through poetry, not to teach the poetry itself, so you don’t need to be a literature expert.

Most of the tried and tested activities used regularly by language teachers can be adapted easily to bring poetry into the classroom.

• Communicative speaking activities

• Working on pronunciation

• Writing activities

• Some pros and cons

• Conclusion

Communicative speaking activities

Before doing any productive work, I like to give my students plenty of pre-reading activities so that they are adequately prepared.

Read the complete article at http://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/think/articles

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The English Teaching Resource Center has announced an online contest for the English teachers.

All English teachers can take part in this online contest (by submitting their lesson plans to teach English at different levels) and become the winner!

The winners will be invited to give a presentation at the ETRC and will get some valuable prizes.

The ETRC team says, “All you have to do is to submit a model lesson plan to our e-mail: etrc_moldova@yahoo.com

All the submitted lesson plans have to satisfy the following rules:

1. They should contain the following:

• Title
• Author
• Proficiency level (beginning, inter, advanced)
• Grade level (e.g., 11th form) or General level (e.g., adult
• Skills and subskills (e.g., Writing/summarizing)
• Subject area (e.g., literature, social studies, science, ESP, etc.).
• Objectives (Indicate the specific skills and/or areas that are the focus of the lesson.)
• Duration (Specify the time needed for this lesson)
• Materials and technology (Include worksheets or other documents for this lesson and specify any technology needed. You can insert them here or attach them as separate documents.)

Procedure
Assessment (specify any assessment tools used to measure the lesson objectives.)
Extension or Follow up

References
Useful link

2. The objectives of the lesson should follow the curriculum (formulate them in the form of “bare” infinitives according to Bloom’s taxonomy);
3. Your plan should be based on topics, which are included in Moldovan textbooks;
4. All the didactic materials should be submitted together with the plan;
5. Use supplementary and authentic materials;
6. Non-traditional, challenging methods of teaching will have an advantage!

About ETRC

The English Teaching Resource Center (ETRC) was created by the U.S. Embassy and “I. Creanga” State Pedagogical University in collaboration with the British Embassy to Moldova. It is a multi-media center created to help English teachers improve their knowledge of English, to assist them in developing their lessons and classroom teaching skills, and to promote communication and professional association among English language teachers across the republic.

To know about ETRC, please visit this site: http://www.etrc.md

Click this link http://www.etrc.md/onlinecontest.html to visit the ETRC’s contest page.