It may be difficult for people who were born decades after the end of the conflict to imagine what an important role poetry played in World War I Britain. In addition, the results of an Exploratory Practice (EP) activity (Allwright 2001) suggest ways in which the two poems are read by the language students who were exposed to the texts in our research. Through a Systemic Functional Linguistic (SFL) perspective – as developed by Michael Halliday (Halliday-Hasan 1989 Eggins 2004) – and resorting in particular to Appraisal analysis as explained in the work of James Martin (Martin-White 2005), each verse in the poems is examined. This article discusses what semantic effects are created by means of the choices made by Brooke and Owen, and what happened as we investigated how the poems reach today’s readers – namely, a group of advanced English students from a language school in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. In stark contrast, Owen, who enlisted after Brooke’s death, experienced such horrors firsthand and eventually set as a declared goal to alert the people about the unmitigated tragedy of war, which he does in his poem. His Soldier is the ultimate celebration of how wonderful it is to die for one’s country. Brooke wrote at the beginning of the War, having been to it but unaware, as most people were at the time, of the true horrors that were about to arise. Studying different aspects of language, such as the ones investigated by Michael Halliday (Halliday-Hasan 1989) and James Martin (Martin-White 2005), could help those readers enhance their understanding of the ways in which intended meaning are construed.įor a number of scholars, Rupert Brooke’s 1914 poem The Soldier and Wilfred Owen’s 1917 poem Dulce Et Decorum Est are highly representative examples of two opposing attitudes towards the sacrifice made by World War I soldiers – a sacrifice that the authors themselves would make, as poet soldiers who died during the War, not very long after producing their respective pieces. Besides whatever feelings and idiosyncrasies may be at play at any given situation, the skill of the author in the use of linguistic features has an importance that may not be immediately apparent to some of us. ![]() The activity points to a macro way of reading, as the complex and active meaning-making process carried out by students requires them to go beyond their most immediate cultural references and try to incorporate into their understanding a multitude of perspectives.Īmong all who enjoy reading poetry there are those like ourselves, who believe they are able to tell just when a certain poem speaks to them, and when it does not. As learners were introduced to ways of understanding how Brooke and Owen pieces of poetry which stand to this day as powerful representatives of opposing points of view towards the idea of dying for one’s country, they were able to reflect on the social and historical aspects of literacy. We then conducted an Exploratory Practice activity with students of a private language school in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. With the use of concepts from the Appraisal system (Martin 2000b), we analyzed the World War I poems The Soldier, by Rupert Brooke, and Dulce Et Decorum Est, by Wilfred Owen. This article aims at discussing how critical literacy can be fostered in EFL students by means of the linguistic analysis of poetry. Her research projects focus on Applied Linguistics, mainly in pedagogical contexts, considering the interface between systemic-functional linguistics and critical discourse analysis sociocultural theory narrative and identity studies. E-mail: Nogueira Accioly Nóbrega is a professor at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro, in the area of Language Studies. He began specializing in intercultural education during his 2012 course at NILE (Norwich Institute for Language Education), and he is a member of the board of the Braz-Tesol Intercultural Language Education SIG, where he participates in training and in the development of projects in the area. Hugo Dart has been an EFL teacher since 1998, having worked at IBEU (Instituto Brasil-Estados Unidos), in Rio de Janeiro, since 2010. Hugo Dart, Adriana Nogueira Accioly Nóbrega, Brazil Would you like to receive publication updates from HLT? Join our free mailing listįostering Critical Literacy Through the Analysis of World War I Poetry Humanising Language Teaching Magazine for teachers and teacher trainers
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |