Poetry teaching in laboratory setting

Abstract

The best samples of a language are seen in the art of poetry. Literary samples of Turkish language from every era of the history of Turks can be seen in poetry. The issue of how to teach poetry is of great interest to the student teachers of Turkish Language and Literature. How is a poem read? How are the emotions reflected in poetry? How can I read a poem appropriately and in line with the rules? How can I understand whether a poem is read appropriately and according to rules? How should I teach poems when I become a teacher? To find the answers to these questions, it seems to be very important for student teachers to conduct some related activities in a laboratory setting. Poem teaching is a teaching activity performed by the related departments of primary, secondary, high schools and universities. Up to now, poems have been usually taught through a classical approach where a good model is called to read a poem and students listen to the model and try to learn how to read the poem. But this approach includes high level of subjectivity as what good model is may vary from one person to other. Due to this subjectivity issue, it has never been possible to claim the way the model reads is the best and most appropriate one; an accordingly, effectiveness of the teaching has not been objectively judged. The subjectivity can be eliminated in laboratory setting as students can clearly recognize the falling and rising tones, stress between the words and phrases, they can see the appropriate reading of the word depending on its meaning. Hence, it can be argued that for poem teaching practices, laboratory setting seems to be an ideal and inevitable teaching setting. As one of the novel settings of learning, phonetics laboratories are ideal places of practice for both teachers and students and they make objective and appropriate poetry teaching possible. Unlike the classical approach, the poetry teaching conducted in a laboratory setting enables students to carry out applied works by hearing and seeing the expert reading on the computer screen. Students can compare their own reading or the readings of their peers with the expert reading and so doing, they can learn which tone to use and where to put the stress by seeing and hearing. In the present study, through the reading of the samples of Classical Turkish Poetry, the success level of the poetry teaching conducted in a laboratory setting was investigated. For this purpose, an expert and student teacher read these samples in the laboratory setting and it was found that the teaching conducted in the laboratory setting is more successful than the classical one. It was concluded that laboratory-aided poetry teaching should especially be incorporated into curriculums of teacher education institutions. Moreover, for an effective poetry teaching to be conducted, there should be a laboratory in each city and there should be an expert in each laboratory to help teachers to use the laboratory in appropriate ways. (C) 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved