The use of poetry to raise intercultural awareness of EFL students

Learning a new language does not involve learning only the four skills - reading, writing, speaking and listening – grammar, vocabulary or pronunciation of the target language. It is not possible to consider a target language without understanding and appreciation of its culture. CEFR (Common European Framework of Reference) highlights the importance of raising intercultural awareness among language learners in order to appreciate and respect the differences between home and target cultures. Literary works are invaluable resources to convey the culture of the target language to students. Thus, as a literary tool, poetry can be used in language classrooms to foster students' intercultural awareness. The purpose of this study is to investigate whether the use of poetry in EFL classrooms can raise intercultural awareness of the students or not. For this purpose, both quantitative and qualitative research methods were adopted. As a quantitative instrument, an intercultural awareness questionnaire the questions of which were divided into five categories; namely intercultural interest, intercultural knowledge, intercultural respect, intercultural activities, intercultural communication was developed. The questionnaire was distributed to both control and experimental group students who were attending the Preparatory School of a state university in İzmir at the beginning of the spring semester of the 2013-2014 academic year. After the questionnaire, the experimental group students were exposed to 8 poems with different cultural elements in them two hours a week for a duration of two months while control group students followed their weekly schedule without any implementation. As a qualitative part of the research, experimental group students were also asked to keep student diaries to reflect their ideas after each poem. The same questionnaire was conducted both with control and experimental group students after the implementation as the post test. The data were analyzed using SPSS .The results of the study reveal that poetry implementation in EFL classrooms has a positive effect especially on the development of students' intercultural interest and intercultural knowledge. The analysis of the student diaries also shows that the use of poetry in language classrooms fosters students' awareness of different cultures of the world and that they are willing to be exposed to more poetry lessons in their language classrooms in the future.