Written in March -- Alberta style

Recently I've been reading a lot of poetry. The students in my afternoon ESL class were interested in improving their pronunciation, and I wondered if reading poetry might be a good way to go about this. We started with the iconic prairie child's picture book (in appearance a children's book, but really for the adults) If you're not from the prairie, by David Bouchard. As I told the students, this entire poem is a hyperbole -- exaggeration to create a powerful image -- about life on the prairie. They all agreed, however, that the poet might be justified in saying, "If you're not from the prairie, you don't know the wind..." as well as "...you don't know the cold..."

Well, it turned out that reading poetry is a perfect way to practice pronunciation, so I got really serious about this. My starting point is an American book, English Pronunciation Made Simple, which approaches pronunciation sound-by-sound. I carefully select poems that contain the sounds we are learning.

"Written in March," by William Wordsworth is one of those poems. This is one of my favourites, and today while riding my bike, some of the lines came to mind.

And here it is -- Alberta style, illustrated with photos from right where I live:

The cock is crowing,
The stream is flowing,

The small birds twitter,
The lake doth glitter

The green field sleeps in the sun.

  

(Okay, I know this one is a bit of a stretch, but you can see the green grass, can't you?)

The oldest and youngest
Are at work with the strongest;
The cattle are grazing, 

 Their heads never raising;
There are forty feeding like one!  

 (I didn't see any cattle this morning, but I did see the very ones he is talking about on my way home from Edmonton on Thursday)

Like an army defeated,

The snow hath retreated,

(Well, it's beginning its retreat, anyway!)

And now doth fare ill

On the top of the bare hill.

The ploughboy is whooping, anon, anon.

(I agree -- it's not much of a hill. We don't have many bare hills around here yet)

There's joy in the mountains;
There's life in the fountains;
Small clouds are sailing,
Blue sky prevailing; The rain is over and gone! 

(Blue sky certainly prevails today, but I'm afraid the rain is yet to come.)

Other poems we've used so far are "How Do I Love Thee?" by Elizabeth Barrett Browning; "The Road Not Taken," "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" and "Dust of Snow," by Robert Frost; and "Who Has Seen the Wind?" by Christina Rossetti. Not only are these wonderful pronunciation practice, as the students read slowly and carefully, but a lot of new vocabulary is introduced almost effortlessly.

Each time we start a new poem, I can tell the students are overwhelmed and I wonder if I chose wisely, but as we read through it slowly, discussing the words and ideas, the light dawns. Imagine the thrill I felt when we were reading our reader (Leaving Microsoft to Change the World, by John Wood) and one of the students related John's decision-making to "The Road Not Taken."