Poetry for ELLs

Nutrition for Language Development

Let’s analyze the TEKS

Students analyze, make inferences and draw conclusions about theme and genre in different cultural, historical, and contemporary contexts and provide evidence from the text to support their understanding. Students are expected to:3.5(A) paraphrase the themes and supporting details of fables, legends, myths, or stories; 

Students analyze, make inferences and draw conclusions about theme and genre in different cultural, historical, and contemporary contexts and provide evidence from the text to support their understanding. Students are expected to:4.3(A) Summarize and explain the lesson or message of a work of fiction as its theme;

Students analyze, make inferences and draw conclusions about theme and genre in different cultural, historical, and contemporary contexts and provide evidence from the text to support their understanding. Students are expected to:5.3(A) compare and contrast the themes or moral lessons of several works of fiction from various cultures;5.3(C) explain the effect of a historical event or movement on the theme of a work of literature.

Challenges for our students

How can poetry help our ELL students?

Reasons for Poetry• Poetry provides a high quality language model• Even non-English speakers can feel the rhythm,

and music of a poem• Poetry provides the opportunity for listening and

speaking• Simple language may express very complex ideas• It addresses human experience across cultures• Provides good opportunities for pronunciation

exercises for individual words, and sentence melody, and intonation

• Perfect text to learn by heart, and acquire sentence structure, and vocabulary

Advantages of Poetry for ELL

Poetry and ELLs• Sounds

• Fluency

• Vocabulary

• Comprehension

Sounds

• Patterns

• Stress

• Rhyme

• Rhythm

Poems can be categorized according to their sound.

oOnomatopoeiaoAlliterationoRhymingoAssonanceoConsonance

SOUND EFFECTS

SENSORY IMAGES

STANZAS

WHO IS SPEAKING?

THEME:

WHAT IS THE MESSAGE?

AUTHOR’S PURPOSE

INT

EN

DE

D

AU

DIE

NC

E

TO

NE

Poetry is the target

Consonance

Rhyming

Asso

nan

ce

Allit

era

tion

Ono

mat

opoe

ia

Say and Touch

Vocabulary• Literal and Figurative Meaning

• Painting with Words

• Sensory Images

• Easy to remember

Waiting Room Zoo

Waiting Room Zoo

FLUENCY

Reading/Fluency. Students read grade-level text with fluency and comprehension. Students are expected to read aloud grade-level appropriate text with fluency (rate, accuracy, expression, appropriate phrasing) and comprehension.

Humpty DumptyFluency

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall

Humpty Dumpty had a great fall

All the king’s horsemen and all the king’s men

Couldn’t put Humpty together again!

FLUENCY• Phrasing• Intonation• Prosody• Rhythm

• In Plano,o3rd grade: from 90 to 100 WPMo4th grade: from 100 to 120 WPMo5th grade: from 120 to 135 WPM

Comprehension

• Making Emotional

Connections

• Deep Thinking• Inferring and Drawing

Conclusions

Stage Fright

• Read the poem at your table.

• What comprehension skills could be addressed through this poem?

Bringing it all together

How do sounds, images, emotions and thoughts

contribute to the theme of the poem?

Poets about poetry• “It is blood , imagination, intellect running

together…It bids us to touch and taste and hear and see the world, and shrink from all that is of the brain only.” William Butler Yeats

• “…A tough life needs a tough language- and that is what poetry is. That is what literature offers– a language powerful enough to say how it is. It isn’t a hiding place. It is a finding place.” Jeanette Winterson

Find the poems that wake you up, that

allow you to marvel at the miracle of language and its

power!