A New Approach to Teaching English Poetry to EFL Students

Poetry like other literary genres exists to be enjoyed and appreciated. The difficult task facing any instructor is to develop this sense of appreciation and enjoyment in students who are not interested in poetry. For a long time, literature in general and poetry in particular, was purged from the teaching programmes on the ground that it made no contribution to learning a foreign language for practical purposes. Fortunately, in the past few decades there has been a renewed interest in using literature in the language classroom. Despite the renewed interest in teaching literary texts in the classroom, little has been written about teaching poetry to college-level students in Iran. Many English instructors along with many