Teaching haiku to develop a voice in EFL contexts: A summary of Iida´s (2010) article

     In the article “Developing voice for composing haiku: A social-expressivist approach for teaching haiku writing in EFL contexts” Iida (2010) explores the advantages of teaching haiku, clarifies its structure, purpose and interpretation, and provides guidelines to teach haiku in EFL classrooms.  The author begins by stating the difficulties observed in university EFL students to apply previous knowledge of English into their classes and suggests a possible explanation.

     However, there are actions to be taken into the classrooms to reverse this tendency. Iida (2010) suggests teaching haiku as a means to enable students to develop a voice, to help improve their writing skills and to create an audience to present those poems to.   The author later provides background supporting the development of a voice and an audience in students.

     As for haiku itself, the author explains the structure all haikus should have as well as their purpose. He goes even further and provides a haiku he wrote himself and an interpretation of it.

     Furthermore, Iida (2010) offers guidelines to teach how to write haikus in EFL classrooms by dividing work into two moments: textual analysis and composing haikus. In the first part, students will focus on reading poems and answering guiding questions. In order to understand them better, he offers an interpretation of his own haiku and the reasons and context in which it was written.  In the second part, the author provides five steps to guide the composing of the haiku. He advices to review the concept of haiku, to collect material for it, to compose one, to read peers´ poems and to publish them.

     Iida (2010) concludes that “composing haiku in EFL university classrooms enables students to develop an identifiable voice with a high sense of writer-reader interaction” (p. 43).

References

Iida, A.(2010). Developing voice by composing haiku: A social-expressivist approach for teaching haiku writing in EFL contexts. English Teaching Forum.  1.