Teaching English Poetic Texts to Yemeni Undergraduates

Of all literary genres, poetry, with its linguistic and artistic unorthodoxy, is believed to contribute the least in the development of students' linguistic competence. How do we introduce this unorthodox discourse into the rule-governed world of language learning? Mainstream poetry pedagogies have proved an inadequate option and so have 'traditional' stylistic pedagogies. This book proposes an eclectic stylistic approach which synthesizes bottom-up with top-down approaches to text processing. The approach has two stages, the analysis and the pedagogy, which correspond to the two roles to be assumed by teachers who wish to adopt the proposed approach. A combination of literary stylistics and the Iserian strand of reader response has been suggested to meet the demands of analysis and the same combination synthesized with practical stylistics to meet the demands of pedagogy. A stylistic analysis and pedagogical treatment of Half an Hour After and The Conclusion (treated as one text for thematic considerations) by Mark O'Connor, and A Dream Deferred by Langston Hughes have been carried out using the proposed approach and trialed on a sample of Yemeni undergraduate students of poetry.