1. Humanizing the language classroom

In 2006 the well known and respected applied linguist Claire Kramsch made the point that second and foreign language (SFL) pedagogy and research have lost the perception of ‘the flesh and blood individuals who are doing the learning’ (Kramsch Reference Kramsch2006: 98). Although she did not put it in such terms, her point was that the SFL classroom has to a certain extent been dehumanized. This process is largely structural and relates to the desire to design language learning in terms drawn from the world of business management (Newman & Hanauer Reference Newman and Hanauer2005). SFL is directed by the imposition of abstract standards, the requirement for particular teaching methods and evaluation tied to external standardized tests. SFL teachers, whatever their desires and orientations, are bound to these managerial directives through contractual agreements, the requirement to use specific textbooks, and evaluation and promotion based on test results. Language learning within these settings is defined overwhelmingly in linguistic, structural and cognitive terms. Thus, the language learner at the center of this system becomes nothing more than an intellectual entity involved in an assessable cognitive process.

However, as Kramsch stated (Reference Kramsch2009), learning a language has multiple and unpredictable ramifications in how language learners perceive and conceptualize their subjectivities as a result of entering the world of bilingualism. Put simply, learning a language is a significant, potentially life-changing, event. Furthermore, it is an event that involves the whole human being, beyond just intellectual abilities. However, the experiences, emotions and symbolic transformations inherent in the process of learning a language are erased and superseded within SFL teaching by the overriding emphasis placed on the communicative and cognitive aims of language usage, to such an extent that it seems natural to avoid any discussion of the human in the classroom and to emphasize the learning and testing of a decontextualized code.

Widdowson has argued that language in the language classroom is by definition decontextualized, even when it is drawn from communicative language settings or based on large corpuses of ‘real world’ language usage. The problem, simply put, is that language ‘can only be made pragmatically real if it is reconnected up with context of some kind’, and since ‘the only contexts available for reconnection are those of the foreign language classroom, which are, of course, entirely different from those that gave rise to the language in the first place’ (Widdowson Reference Widdowson1998: 712), language in the classroom is decontextualized. While the ideology of communicative and process-orientated classrooms is to contextualize language, the practice often confuses the historical, original contextualization of language with the classroom use of that language. As stated by Widdowson (Reference Widdowson1998), the real challenge in the language classroom is to construct ‘a kind of pedagogic artifice whereby language is contrived to be engaged with and learned from’ (p. 713). In my terms, the real difficulty of language teaching is to find a way to make language learning a personally contextualized, meaningful activity for the learner.

It is the idea of this living, thinking, experiencing and feeling person at the center of the language learning process that this paper develops. Broadly, my aim is to integrate what I have termed elsewhere, in relation to the reading of poetry, as the ‘principle of the unique’ (Hanauer Reference Hanauer2003), which emphasizes the individuality of experience with literacy pedagogy for SFL learners. My goal is in many ways practical, in that I will offer a concrete and accessible classroom methodology for achieving what I consider to be the aim of language learning: facilitating personally meaningful expression. My aims are also theoretical in that I, like Kramsch (Reference Kramsch2009), wish to reorientate SFL pedagogy from an emphasis on a decontextualized and managerial learning process towards an understanding of the presence of a living, historically situated, individual human being at the center of the language learning process.

In this paper, I will develop the concept of meaningful literacy and offer a specific classroom methodology that takes this approach to ESL/EFL literacy instruction. The paper is divided into three sections. In the first I will develop the concept of meaningful literacy learning in second and foreign language pedagogical contexts. In the second I will summarize some empirical evidence (Hanauer Reference Hanauer2010) that characterizes the L2 poetry writing produced through my pedagogical approach. The third section of the paper describes the practical aspects of the pedagogy of poetry writing that I am promoting. Together, these should allow a full understanding of the philosophical, empirical and practical aspects of the approach to ESL/EFL literacy instruction that I develop in this paper, and that I propose as a way of humanizing the SFL language classroom.

2. Meaningful literacy learning

Underpinning the discussion of ESL/EFL literacy pedagogy that is presented in this paper is the importance I assign to what it means to be human. My position on being a human draws heavily upon the philosophical concept of phenomenological experience and the qualitative research understanding of participant perspective. What connects these two domains is the importance of personal meaning construction. From both a phenomenological and a qualitative research perspective, human beings are characterized by their ability to make sense of themselves and their surroundings. This individualized making of sense through the use of physically embodied representational and symbolic resources is what makes us present to ourselves in our environments. From a philosophical perspective, our individualized sense-making is who we are and how we experience and understand the world. Basically, to be human means to make meaning of the world we live in.

The word ‘meaning’ in the way I am using it here is closest to the way this term is used within qualitative research. The researcher and theorist Joseph Maxwell (Reference Maxwell1996) defines meaning within the context of participant perspective in the following way:

Significant within this definition of meaning is the wide range of human resources that it involves. To understand the world, to make sense of the world, involves far more than just intellectual activity. It involves affect and intention and integrates personal history and future actions. It is a holistic activity that defines the self at the moment of understanding and a perspective and orientation towards the world.

With this concept in mind, it is worth considering briefly the nature of actually learning a language. What is this like from the perspective of the language learner? To answer this I will return to Kramsch (Reference Kramsch2009) and address an interesting data set that she presents in developing her own argument on the importance of subjectivity in language learning. The data comes from a research study that involved the generation of metaphors concerning language learning. Foreign language students were asked to complete the following prompt: ‘Learning a language is like’. The following offers a limited but characteristic list of these metaphors:

What is truly fascinating about the answers provided is the physical, sensory nature of the descriptions themselves. Learning a language, at least as seen in this data set, would seem to be embodied in the physical, intellectual and emotional life of the individual language learner. Rather than a purely cognitive endeavor, language learning seems to address a much wider and deeper set of human faculties. Kramsch (Reference Kramsch2009) summarizes her own position in relation to language learning by stating ‘the language learning experience is likely to engage learners cognitively, emotionally, morally and aesthetically’ (p. 43).

The outcome of the discussion presented so far is the idea that learning a language is a human endeavor which interacts with a wide range of human capacities. It is an emotional and embodied experience in addition to being a cognitive process. If this characterization of language learning is valid and reflects the experiences of a much wider set of students than just those within the limited data set presented above, a very different orientation towards language education would have to be initiated. This new approach would need to address the human individual at the center of language learning and recognize the symbolic transformations in relation to self and world that learning a language entails.

In my own pedagogical work I have embraced this way of conceptualizing SFL literacy instruction. I term this approach Meaningful Literacy Instruction, and it is based on a particular way of understanding and positioning the language learner and the language learning process. Firstly, and perhaps most importantly, I consider the language learner to be a socially and culturally contextualized individual with a rich, extended history of personal experience. This sense of the richness of the internal world of the individual extensively informs my instructional design and everyday interaction with language learners. Secondly, I see learning a language as part of a process of widening and deepening the ways an individual can understand, interpret, feel and express her or his personally meaningful understandings to themselves and within social settings. Finally, I believe that learning a language involves an interaction with everything that makes up the experience and understanding of the learner, including issues of identity and self perception. Together, these underpinning assumptions position the individual learner and her/his personal experience, history and social contextualization at the center of the learning experience.

Based on this understanding of the language learner, I have formulated a series of core principles that inform my teaching of SFL writing instruction. The aim of these principles is to direct a process through which meaningful literacy will be at the center of the instruction. The four principles are as follows:

1. 1. Autobiographical Writing: Employ writing that utilizes memory, imagination and personal experience to explore and understand the self.

2. 2. Emotional Writing: Promote a student writing process that activates and elicits emotional responses from the writer and the reader and endorses the expression of personal feelings.

3. 3. Personal Insight: Integrate a reflective process that leads to a deepened appreciation and understanding of personal experience (and, ultimately, greater understanding of the human condition).

4. 4. Authentic Public Access: Situate writing within a social process of presenting personally held beliefs, understandings and feelings to others in the language learning classroom and beyond the classroom to people and communities who are of significance to the writer.

ESL/EFL literacy instruction based on these principles produces a very distinct and human educational experience. The aim is to make the literacy work in the class meaningful on the personal and social levels, as well as giving a sense of depth and ownership to the writing itself.

I would argue that constructing ESL/EFL writing instruction on these principles enacts the type of repositioning and recontextualization of language teaching that Widdowson (Reference Widdowson1998) argues for. It enacts a process in which the language learner's memory, experiences, feelings, beliefs, history and social environment are the context of language use. Furthermore, this way of designing writing instruction overcomes the absence of a sense of voice, authority and ownership so characteristic of the majority of language learning experiences, which are required to conform to conventionalized expression. As stated by Widdowson (Reference Widdowson1993), language learners frequently face the classroom experience of ‘saying things in a foreign language because you can say them rather than because they express what you want to say’ (p. 384). I agree with his suggestion that ‘you are proficient in a language to the extent that you possess it, make it your own, bend it to your will, assert yourself through it rather than simply submit to the dictates of its form’ (p. 384). Writing instruction designed on the principles outlined above makes the writer the context of his or her own language use and learning, and directs a process in which written language is directed by the expressive needs of the writer.

As an example of my approach, consider the following poem written by a female student in my ESL introductory college writing class. As I will explain below, I see poetry writing as one simple way of manifesting Meaningful Literacy Instruction in the language classroom and accordingly, all my ESL students actually write books of poetry as a regular part of their literacy instruction. This particular poem was written by an Israeli student.

Footnote ¹ Even though I have read this poem many times, it still sends a shiver up my spine every time I read it anew. This is a poem that deals with the most significant of human moments – the final parting from one's mother. It is a poetic second funeral and burial of the writer's mother, and part of a process of personal healing for this particular student. This poem, which was written as part of an ESL College Writing course, presents a deeply personal, sincere and emotional statement about one the most meaningful moments of this student's life. In response to the task of ESL poetry writing, she chose to explore her feelings on losing her mother and to represent and enact the need to revisit this moment. This poem in response to a classroom task is in no way an exercise or just work for a grade. This is truly meaningful literacy in which the student uses a new resource – the ESL poem – to construct and explore her innermost thoughts and experiences.

Another student, this time from Japan, in the same class wrote the following poem.

This poem describes an experience that this student had during her time as a study abroad student in the US. After a long and very cold, snow-bound winter, spring finally arrived in North-Western Pennsylvania and this poet, while walking on campus, found a blooming Sakura tree. As she looked at the tree, she closed her eyes and had a sudden memory of a similar tree near her home in Japan and of people and children around the tree. This is a truly beautiful image that integrates her past and present experiences and positions her at the nexus of related realities. It is a moment of connection and beauty and as with all moments of this kind, she recognizes in her last line the fleetingness of this beauty. As with the last poem, this poem was written in response to a classroom requirement, but this is no classroom exercise. This is an example of honest and emotional writing that really brings the authentic experience of the poet-writer to the center of her use of literacy.

What these two poems exemplify is a distinct orientation towards literacy in the ESL/EFL language classroom. The students really expressed themselves in the poems and dealt with the complexities of their own lives. Each one is an example of meaningful literacy in the language classroom. In my class, personal and meaningful content is paramount. The students are directed to use writing in order to really express and explore themselves. The core language learning principle in my pedagogical work is that extending language use will result from the true desire for personal expression. Furthermore, the whole perception of what learning a language is changes when authentic, meaningful, personal expression is at the center of literacy instruction. The real reason for learning a language becomes an issue of extending personal understanding and personal expression. Every year when I teach my students to write poetry in a second language, I have students who come up to me and thank me for allowing them to say what they, in many cases, have not been able to say before, even in their first language. The moment when you really express your innermost thoughts and experiences in a second language is a powerful one, and one that can qualitatively change a student's perception of the new language that they are using. It is the point at which a second language ceases to be a tool and becomes a personal resource and an ‘owned’ language.

3. The characteristics of second language poetry

Many teachers and students are skeptical of the idea that poetry can be written in the SFL classroom. I have been told many times that SFL learners cannot write poetry and that this is too difficult a task for this population. In response to this skepticism, let me first offer some personal anecdotal evidence. As part of my professional duties as a professor I teach an introductory ESL College Writing class to study-abroad students who come to the US. I have taught this class for the last seven years and every time I teach it, I assign my students a poetry writing task. To date, I have not had a single student who did not manage to actually write a book of poetry and was not able to present it in public to other students in the class and to family members and friends in their homes. I have collected over a thousand second-language poems and have ample evidence that at least my advanced English language learning students from across the world are all capable of writing poetry.

However, a more systematic answer to this skepticism is required. Accordingly, as part of a larger project that dealt with the ways in which poetry writing could be used as a research method, I conducted a detailed analysis of the corpus of poetry generated by my pedagogical approach to second language literacy instruction (Hanauer Reference Hanauer2010). My aim was to characterize the textual nature of the second language poetry written in my classroom. Obviously, this is an analysis not of the genres of poetry but of the type of poetry written within the framework of the pedagogy I will outline in my next section. However, I think this is still useful in that it outlines the characteristics of the second language poetry written by these students and counters the perception that only professional, accomplished and first language English speakers write poetry.

In analyzing the corpus of 844 second language poems generated over six years in my ESL College Writing class, I used a range of linguistic, textual and literary measures to explore the characteristics of this body of second language poetry. The analysis addressed text size, lexical category, the Lexical Frequency Profile (Laufer & Nation Reference Laufer and Nation1999), poetic features, thematic organization, lexical content and degree of emotionality. A full presentation of this analysis can be found in Chapter Three of Hanauer (Reference Hanauer2010), but for our purposes the following summary may suffice. The poetry written in my course is short: an average of 53 words, ten lines, two stanzas and five words per line. This poetry predominantly uses first person singular (I); 6.5% of words are verbs in the present tense and 2.83% past tense, and there is limited usage of conjunctions, negations and quantifiers. The poetry uses high-frequency vocabulary: 84.06% of the words used in these poems came from a list of the 2,000 most frequent words in English (Laufer & Nation Reference Laufer and Nation1999), and 90.28% fell within the 3,000 most frequent words (Laufer & Nation Reference Laufer and Nation1999). The poetry includes poetic features, the most common being visual and auditory imagery. In addition, there is some usage of rhyme and alliteration and limited usage of figurative language. In order to measure the presence of emotionality in the poems, a computational linguistic analysis that counts emotional words from an established emotive lexicon was used. The results found a comparatively high level of emotive vocabulary usage: 7.17% of the vocabulary consisted of words conveying emotion, compared to 2.57% for controlled, non-emotional writing; and 4.89% in literary novels written by the great writers of the English language (see Pennebaker et al. Reference Pennebaker, Chung, Ireland, Gonzales and Booth2007). In other words, from the perspective of the emotional lexicon, this poetry is emotive and expresses the emotional lives of these students. Its characteristics, especially the shortness of the text, the simplicity of the vocabulary and the emphasis on visual imagery suggest that this is well within the abilities of advanced SFL writers. This is not a difficult writing task and is one that can be completed by SFL writers when provided with suitable encouragement and instruction.

4. The pedagogy of advanced SFL poetry writing

The basic idea that directs my pedagogy is that on a deep level every human being wishes to express and explore the meaning of their own lives. In other words, I deeply value the way each individual uniquely understands their own lived experience and I see this reservoir of memories as a resource for producing meaningful content in literacy practice. Writing evolves in a meaningful manner in my classes by enabling me to address and take a real interest in the student's unique experience. Accordingly, second language writing instruction within my classroom is situated within a process of personal exploration of memory and the expression of personal understanding and insight to other class members and significant people (beyond the classroom) within the student's life.

My teaching methodology can be summarized as consisting of the following simple prompt:

Basically, I direct students through a process of exploring their own memories and then expressing those memories. It really is a very simple pedagogy that results in a process of poetry writing and self reflection. I cannot stress how simple this methodology is and how accessible this makes poetry for every writer.

In designing a course around poetry writing, I distinguish three important stages of the educational process. As the starting point of any poetry writing project, I spend time generating personal motivation for self exploration. I explain the relevance of the project to the student. My aim is that the student-poets will be interested in the exploration of their own lives and be willing to express this understanding to others. Ultimately the motivation is always self-discovery, self-understanding and self-expression. At this initial stage, my role as teacher is to create a social environment in which it is safe, desirable, engaging and exciting to find out and tell others about their lives.

In order to actually facilitate poetry writing I then initiate a process of autobiographical exploration. This is a quite extensive process which involves looking at childhood, migration, education, travel, relationships, traumatic experiences, achievements, transitions and loss. I often direct students to make life maps and mark out their life experiences. I use techniques of guided imagination in which I ask students to visualize and relive past experiences. This can be as simple as ‘close your eyes and think back to a particular moment in your life – try to visualize it, what are you feeling, what can you see, look for the details of the experience itself’. I make students list meaningful moments, relive these experiences in imagination and discuss these experiences with other student-poets. The outcome of this process is a large amount of authentic, personally contextualized, meaningful material that can be used for writing and self exploration.

The final stage of this process consists of the poetic expression of autobiographical memory. Contrary to lay expectations, poetry writing is relatively simple to do. In essence, the type of poetry written in my classroom is the visual description of memorized experiences expressed in simple language and using straightforward poetic techniques of lining and imagery. The basic guideline is to use language to describe how you experienced that remembered moment. However, like every other form of writing, it requires experimentation, revision and time. As a simple criterion, I tell students that poetry is about ‘showing the experience’ and not ‘telling about it’. I also introduce students to the idea that the form of the poem directs the reading experience (for example, line breaks slow the poem down; images make the reader see, hear or smell certain things. . .).

In reviewing the poems, my most important response to the writer is to ask them if the poem accurately recreates the experience as they remember it. Of course, I have no way of judging the actual accuracy of the poem with respect to the writer's memory, but through conversation and discussion of questions such as ‘What was it like?’ and ‘Does this poem actually convey that personal sense of the experience?’, the poem evolves and slowly changes to approach as close as possible the poet's sense of the experience and his or her ability to convey this experience to others. Student poets seem to honestly want to convey their sense of their own experiences. Thus, the scaffolding of this process involves extensive discussion of poems and experiences with the instructor and other students, and revision based on these responses.

To give a sense of the design and development of my poetry writing class, this is the schematic outline of the syllabus: (1) Introduction to poetry writing – reading others’ poetry; (2) Thinking, imagining, reliving and talking about a significant life moment; (3) Investigating and exploring the genre of poetry; (4) Exploring personal experience – listing memories, discussion of unique, personally meaningful experiences; valuing one's personal history; (5) Poetry writing experimentation – checking your poetry in relation to its ability to ‘show not tell’ and to recreate your experience in another reader; (6) Classroom reading of poetry, peer and instructor interaction and the sharing of poetry with individuals the poet writer considers to be of significance beyond the classroom; and (7) Production and sharing of a complete poetry book.

The pedagogy that I have described for facilitating poetry writing is truly easy and makes poetry writing accessible to a wide range of SFL students. My own work, outlined above, has mainly been with ESL students, but current research using this same method of generating poetry by one of my graduate students – Atsushi Iida – is showing similar results with EFL students writing L2 English poetry in Japan. While this is an uncomplicated methodology, the consequences of using poetry writing in the SFL classroom are far-reaching. This methodology overturns the core aims of most language classrooms, moving from a decontextualized focus on code, communication and cognition to a focus on personal experience and expression. Anecdotally, I can report that students who go through this experience report on changed perceptions of what the English language means to them: from a distant instrumental entity, the English language becomes a personal, emotive and expressive resource.

5. Meaningful literacy in the classroom

As I stated at the beginning, my agenda in this plenary is to reorientate SFL pedagogy towards the individual, living language learner, who is at the center of this process. Meaningful literacy, the approach to writing instruction that situates the appreciation and expression of the uniqueness of personal experience at the center of literacy practice, is one way of enacting this change. As argued by Kramsch (Reference Kramsch2009), what is currently missing in many language learning and teaching environments is the understanding of the deep transformative aspects of becoming bilingual, an appreciation of the symbolic shift in subjectivity that learning a language entails. By working with poetry as a form of meaningful literacy, students learn about themselves, about the presence of others, and the diversity of thought and experience that are so much part of this world. Ultimately, learning a language is about widening one's expressive resources and positioning oneself in a multicultural and multilingual world. Poetry writing is a simple way of achieving these aims and personalizing the language classroom.