Teaching Poetry in Korean Language Classes

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article illustrates how literature was incorporated into the curricula of Korean language classes and reports the effects it had on students and instructors. Poetry, a genre of literary text, was chosen because of its brevity and rhythmic nature, which allows students to gain immediate access to Korean authors' original writings. The intent was to build a more authentic curriculum that empowers students as authors and as intellectual thinkers in the target language from the outset to bridge the gap between the existing language curricula and literature curricula. The results from the first-year classes show that poetry lessons inspired students to creatively use Korean as a thinking tool and that students directly applied learned expressions for everyday objects and concrete verbs in their poetry writing. Students from the second year reported that the process of reading, understanding, and writing poems added a new dimension of meaningful exercises to the existing curriculum and that the poetry project increased an understanding of Korean society in its historic contexts. After studying poetry for 2 years, students not only developed an ability to appreciate poetry in the context of Korean culture and history, but also appreciated the complexity and depth of the creative writing process.