DEVELOPING INDEPENDENT READERS OF POETRY: AN APPROACH TO TEACHING POETRY IN THE HIGH SCHOOL

Abstract

The last issue of the Journal was devoted to "English Studies." Not inappropriately, no reports of research such as our issues normally contain appeared, for the climate of freedom of action recognised by all our contributors to be essential for the development of good language hardly lends itself to the constraints a researcher must customarily impose - least of all in the study of literature. The study below is interesting not only because it advocates for high school students a process in poetry much freer of constraints than what (in spite of the views of the academic leadership) is still the rule in English classrooms; it also offers a means of obtaining a quantitative estimate of the consequences. Patrick Dias' model here has the merit of being scaled both to the values and to the resources of the enterprising high-school English teacher; in its own modest terms, which admittedly are not those of the research purist, it will nevertheless convince the sceptical teacher that there is nothing to lose, and everything to gain, in genuine teacher free discussion.