The Language of Poetry
Informs a Student's Cognitive Shift
from the Concrete to the Abstract.

By Annie Gordon
February 28, 2008

Working with third semester students can be exciting as their vocabulary and understanding of the German language continually expands. At the same time, the second year (third and fourth semesters) of German instruction can prove challenging as students begin making the shift from communicating concrete statements relating to everyday life and themselves, to communicating abstract thoughts and statements.

This cognitive shift is difficult for many students. For the teacher, finding level-appropriate material that fits into a 50-minute class period presents a significant challenge.

At this level, the instructor can begin to bring in outside texts to facilitate the practice of grammatical concepts and to promote a discussion about a cultural theme. Poems are ideal, because they are short enough in length to be used in a 50-minute class session, and they provide a contained structure in which students can negotiate the shift from concrete to abstract thought and communication. Even more to the point, poems focus on individual words, and in focusing on the individual words within a tightly structured block of text, students can begin to think about what these words mean and how they relate to the surrounding words.

Using poetry has other academic advantages
for students of German. Poetry introduces students to German history, culture, and well-known authors. Students begin to see their studies in a new context when they read creative texts written by native German speakers. They become aware of German as a real language used by real people, and not simply as the language they are studying in a textbook.

E D I T O R ' S     N O T E :

March 26, 2008

Poetry as Pedagogy is a work-in-progress to be completed during the spring semester of 2008. Lesson plans linked to poems listed in the tables below will be published as they are completed by Ms. Gordon. Poems with lesson plans ready for viewing are indicated in green type.

Annie Gordon

Annie Gordon (M.A. Candidate, University of Arkansas, Fayetteville) was born and raised in Little Rock, Arkansas. She began studying German in the eighth grade and continued to study German at Little Rock Central High. She majored in German and Anthropology as an undergraduate at the University of Arkansas and will be finishing her Master of Arts in German at the UofA this year.

She attended Die Deutsche Sommerschule von New Mexico in the summer of 2005 and worked in a retirement home in Munich during the summer of 2007. Her interests include Germanic literature and German literature from the medieval period as well as politics, music, being outdoors, and spending time with family and friends.