Rhyme and Reason in Language Acquisition: Incorporating Poetry into the ESL Classroom

Utah is seeing a rapid increase in K-12 students whose native language is not English. With this increase, teachers face the challenge of finding new and effective teaching methods to reach their ESL (English as a Second Language) students. This research explores the study of poetry as an instrument to improve ESL students\u27 pronunciation of English. When read out loud, poetry can be an exercise in pronouncing consonant sounds (from alliteration), decoding vowel sounds (from rhyme), and acquiring the natural speech rhythm of the English language (from meter). Poetry was selected not only because of its exaggerated sound elements (alliteration, rhyme, and meter) but also because of it is a comfortable and approachable text for ESL students to study. During a six-week study with an ESL student, I found to be very beneficial in my subject\u27s pronunciation of English. This case study has shown poetry to be successful for this individual; therefore, there is a need for further research in this subject