Poetry

This chapter considers the importance of making links with prior knowledge and adopting optimistic narratives through top-down and bottom-up processes when engaging with texts. The authors encourage a shift in mindset from a primary focus on the challenges of linguistically unfamiliar texts to the opportunities of working with complex texts through a focus on big ideas that transcend linguistic and cultural boundaries. The chapter explores two different situations in a classroom, one focused on Shakespeare and the other focused on poetry, two types of texts which have historically been perceived as complex and feeding into the deficit discourses on what might be more difficult to teach to second language learners. To address these deficit discourses the chapter considers more creative ways we can embrace diversity in language in the classroom. A series of Language Challenges are presented that invite the reader to engage with examples of playful use of language that can also be used in the classroom to support reader engagement with texts.