By Dr Irene Stoukou
It’s a mid-semester Wednesday. You step into a lively classroom hoping that today quieter learners will speak up, and contributions will come from across the room, not just the confident few. You have earmarked page 45 with a straightforward activity (which you can run on autopilot) to practise past tense forms and recycle topic vocabulary, yet you can already picture the outcome: some will participate actively, several will sit politely silent, and those who most need a modest success may leave with little to show for their effort. From primary schools to university lecture theatres, the picture is the same: digitally fluent learners who either hesitate when faced with a page of text and/or disengage quickly. Can poetry offer a way through on days like this? In my experience, it can.
Pedagogically, poems provide compact, real-life, high-salience, culturally resonant language that supports vocabulary growth, grammar noticing, as well as cohesion, stance, and prosody. Research in EFL classrooms shows that the use of songs and poems boosts vocabulary, as they provide learners with memorable lexical input and motivate practice and participation (Papantoni & Anastasiadou, 2023). Poetry also enhances “meaningful literacy” by legitimising personal experience and helping learners claim classroom identities in ways conventional tasks may not (Hanauer, 2012). Naturally multimodal, it also supports inclusive practice, since students can respond through text, voice, image or sign, with design choices that shape motivation (Xerri, 2012). Last, digital creation and publication—anonymous or named—amplify quieter voices without extending lesson time.
Three principles keep activities practical and inclusive:
- Task over text. Start from the linguistic focus (e.g., past tense forms; discourse markers) and pick or trim poems to fit.
- Multiliteracies. Legitimise different modes of responding including teen discourse forms—chat bubbles, captioned images, audio snippets—alongside print.
- UDL-aligned inclusion. Follow guidelines of Universal Design for Learning (UDL); provide multiple ways to access inputs and express outputs; allow voice notes and peer scribing; and scaffold in visible steps.
All activities below run on standard school infrastructure, e.g. an LMS/VLE for prompts and galleries; a docs/slides suite for shared drafting and quick polls; storage or a class site for simple exhibitions. Online platforms can be of assistance (e.g., Padlet for walls, BookCreator for class books, Vocaroo for quick audio), alongside built-in device tools (camera, voice notes, mark-up) and accessibility features (live captions, Read Aloud, dictation). Having said that, a paper path for low-tech days works just as well.
Below are eight short (10-15’) activities to use with B1–C1 learners:
- Blackout Poetry (B1–C1)
Public-domain source texts: The Wind in the Willows, The Secret Garden, Treasure Island, Anne of Green Gables.
Students keep only the words that carry their message and blackout/colour the rest, set a reading path, add title, and deliver a 10–15-second reading. Focus: clarity of message; cohesion; tone.
- Persona/Mask Poem (B1–C1)
Inspired by Margaret Atwood’s Songs of the Transformed
Provide frame and pictogram word bank. Students write as a creature/object without naming it, revealing identity through features, habitat, movement, sound, and reaction; peers guess. Focus: stance/voice; concrete imagery.
- Scavenger Hunt (B1)
Provide frame and five stations (Actions-past; Time; Places; Objects/Activities; Linkers). Students collect phrases from stations and craft four vivid lines including past-tense verbs, time markers, places, and linkers. Focus: past simple control; adverbials; topic lexis.
- What-If Chain (B1)
Inspired by Shel Silverstein’s “Whatif”
Provide frame [“What if …?” + (list of worries) → “Then I will … / we could … / you should …” (kind, realistic next steps)]. Students first contribute short What if …? worries drawn from the icon bank; then, they add responses. Read as one class chain. Focus: hedging; possibility; advice; socio-emotional safety.
- Chat-Thread Recast (B2)
Source texts: Carl Sandburg’s “Fog” or Langston Hughes’s “Harlem.” Provide hedges, linkers, and chat-bubble paper template or use school-approved conversation tool. Students recast a short poem as a group chat of 10–12 concise bubbles that sound natural, then highlight what shaped stance and cohesion. Focus: natural tone; modality; discourse signalling.
- Hypertext Poetry: If … (B2)
Inspired by Rudyard Kipling’s “If—”
Provide frame: parallel lines beginning “If you can …” with a single closing identity line “Then you are … .” Students write compact conditional lines with precise verbs and keep the parallel stem, closing with a clear identity/outcome. Focus: concise conditional thinking; resilience/decision-making lexis.
- Haiku Remix (C1)
Inspired by haiku poetry (5–7–5 syllabic structure).
From a 60–120-word source (e.g. newspaper or coursebook text), students compress meaning into a haiku; brief readings centre on the image that “held the whole.” Focus: precision; summary; rhythm.
- Micro Poetry Slam (C1)
Inspired by contemporary youth slam performance (e.g., Solli Raphael).
Present poem and video of a slam performance with marked stress and pauses. Students select 2–4 lines, mark stress/pauses, rehearse quickly, and share a short performance (live or recorded) with captions/transcript. Focus: prosody; fluency; audience-aware delivery.
For many teenagers, poems are the first place where language feels both smaller (manageable) and larger (meaningful) at the same time. That is where engagement starts—and, with careful design, where it can grow.
References
Hanauer, D. I. (2012). Meaningful literacy: Writing poetry in the language classroom. Language Teaching, 45(1), 105–115. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0261444810000522
Kramsch, C. (1993). Context and Culture in Language Teaching. Oxford University Press.
Kress, G., & van Leeuwen, T. (2001). Multimodal discourse: The modes and media of contemporary communication. Arnold.
National Literacy Trust. (2025). Children and young people’s poetry engagement 2025. National Literacy Trust.
Papantoni, A., & Anastasiadou, A. (2023). Enriching vocabulary via songs and poems in teaching English as a foreign language. Research Papers in Language Teaching and Learning, 13 (1), 157–172.
University Mental Health, Neurosciences and Precision Medicine Research Institute. (2023). HBSC Greece 2022–2023: Key findings on adolescents’ reading outside school. UMHRI/EPIPSI.
Xerri, D. (2012). Poetry teaching and multimodality: Theory into practice. Creative Education, 3 (4), 507–512. https://doi.org/10.4236/ce.2012.34077
