Most people don’t know they like poetry. They think it’s something boring you have to study in school, usually in a textbook, usually with a test at the end. They are mostly not wrong. Critical analysis of poetry makes it boring at the age of 11. But it does not have to be.
I’m Alan McGuire, an English teacher and poet based in Madrid. I’ve spent about ten years teaching at International House Madrid, mostly with young learners, and over that time poetry has gone from something I occasionally smuggled into lessons to one of the main ways I think about teaching English.
When I say poetry, I mean it broadly. Sonnets, yes, but also football chants, nursery rhymes, skipping songs, adverts, and whatever someone has scrawled on the back of a toilet door. Anywhere people play with words, there’s poetry, and most of it was never meant for a classroom. That’s what makes it useful.
Poems are built out of the same things learners struggle with: stress, rhythm, sounds, the music of connected speech. A good poem lets you practice all this without thinking too much about it. But pronunciation is only the start. Poetry can also help with reading, speaking with confidence, writing for fun, and picking up vocabulary that actually sticks. We’re not trying to produce the next Walt Whitman or Emily Dickinson. Poetry is the method, not the destination. What I want is for students to hear English, enjoy it, and have a go.
Poetically English is where I gather that work together: classroom ideas, training materials, and the things I’m trying out. I’ve run teacher training sessions on poetry in the young learner classroom, written about it for the International House Journal, and this autumn I’ll be speaking at TESOL-Spain and LitSIG. I’m also building a performance show for schools, involving a disastrous teacher and some very silly machines.
Outside the classroom I write. My poetry collections are Our England and The Last Days of Alicante. Before any of this I was a mental health nurse in the UK for about a decade, which taught me more about communication than any grammar book has.
If you’re a teacher, a school or a training organiser and any of this sounds useful, get in touch.
