Creating Opportunities for Authentic Communicative Exchange : Exploring Haiku, Tanka, and Senryu in English

Poetry can be an ideal way to introduce Communicative English to EFL students. As Kamata (2016) advised, “Literary texts provide meaningful contexts, involve a profound range of vocabulary, encourage cultural awareness and critical thinking, and serve as a stimulus for composition” (p. 5). A class of 23 university students majoring in English chose Japanese-language poetic forms of haiku, tanka and senryu as a basis for completing both written assignments and oral presentations. Some students elected to submit their own compositions of the final poetic form, senryu, in Japanese and English. The opportunity for students to select poems from their own literary tradition and present them to the teacher provided opportunities for authentic communicative exchange.

© The JALT Literature in Language Teaching Special Interest Group