Mary Wollstonecraft

Understanding English poetry
in the Primary Education classroom


Miguel Ángel Galán Pérez








Introduction
Nature of the project
Justification and purpose
The current situation of English literature in TEFL, some approaches
Hypotheses
Resources needed
Anticipation of problems and possible solutions
Methodology
Subjects
Procedures
Data collection
ConclusionBibliography









Introduction
Nature of the project

The following research project is focused on the written form of English language in its artistic aspect: literature. Our aim is to study the reactions and conclusions of a classroom of 22 ten year-old students at a love poem by W. B. Yeats, thus we will be able to measure their interest in poetry and in English cultural manifestationsas well as we will try to trigger their creativity and learning processes.

Justification and purpose

According to the current decree regulating the teaching of the subject of English at Primary school in Andalusia (Decree 105/1992 of June 9th), literature has no specific room in our schools until Secondary education, in this way we are to deal with a new aspect of English years afterEnglish education has begun. Literature and language are intimately connected through history as the former supposes the corpus of the latter, by following the authorities’ commands our students will understand literature as something detached or additional to grammar rules. In other words, we consider literature as the connecting bound between language and socio – cultural aspects.
This projectadvocates for a parallel and interleaved teaching of both branches of English, younger pupils will grow up enjoying beautiful and emotive productions that were created using those “building blocks” that teachers are helping them to manage with, and, what is more, they will be able to write their own “masterpieces” too. The current system of education does not take into account the possible earlycreative potential of children in a foreign language, awaking this potential later may be insufficient or unproductive. For this purpose we will support our project in their brand new creative period in Spanish in order to grow our pupils really bilingual.
Our project will result in a series of students’ likes and dislikes, feelings, emotions and grammar assessment, all these will be our futureguidelines to introducing literature in the classroom from the very beginning of foreign language education.




The current situation of English literature in TEFL, some approaches

As we have stated above, TEFL in Andalusia is regulated by both the educational authorities of the central government of Spain and the regional one. Needless to say, materials that are to be used in the school mustfulfil the standards set by the authorities; those materials obviously reflect the lack of literary contents of the decree regardless of the editorial. Once having analysed those books by Longman, Macmillan, Richmond-Santillana and Oxford we found the complete absence of literary passages or mentions to any author.
From some time on, some colleagues have gone into the possible ways of introducingliterature in the classroom but only as a linguistic corpus instead of the interconnection we dealt with in previous sections. The work English Literature for Spanish Students by Demetriou, E & Ruiz Más J. (Caligrama. Málaga; 2001) has been the only exception we have come across. Its authors provide the teacher with some guide for exploiting texts according to specific needs without forgettingcultural or biographical aspects. Nevertheless, this is not a textbook that helps build some literary knowledge from scratch, which is our main goal; we will not put a plaster on the wound, we just want to prevent the accident.

Hypotheses

The hypotheses concerning the previous steps of this project are as follows:

Ten year-old pupils are sensitive to art once being explained the contents...