Facilitating EFL Students' Learning Grammar With Poems: Classroom Practice and Students' Opinion

Abstract

In order to be successful to communicate in English environment, EFL learners need to master the English Grammar. As urged by Hymes, Grammatical competence is one determinant factor of someone's communicative competence besides Sociolinguistic, Discourse, and Strategic Competence (as cited by Celcei-Murcia, 1991, in Kacani & Mangelli: 2013). However, learning grammar often causes dreadful experience for the students because of the over generated error correction (Baron 1982 as cited in Al-Mekhlafi & Nagaratnam, 2011) and of the grammar difficulty (Green and Hecht, 1992, as stated in Li-Jiu: 2011). In response to the problems, many English Language teachers have tried to facilitate students' learning grammar with more relaxing and fun learning sources such as story Grammar, web-based comic strips, Drama Grammar, Grammar games, and poems. Poem is believed to be valuable for students to learn Grammar since it, as a literary work, can provide “an example of language in use, and is a context for language use” (Widowson: 1971). This paper is aimed at illustrating how poems can be used for facilitating EFL students in learning Grammar. Moreover, this also presents the students' views on the use of poems to facilitate their learning Grammar