Abstract:

For many years, knowledge was considered to be the ultimate factor for success in life. Many teachers still pump knowledge into students’ brains, in hope this will bring them to the desired achievements. While in the past, knowledge was something not all people could have, nowadays it is much more accessible. For a long time, the Intellectual Quotient (IQ) was considered the best predictor of people's success in school or in life but these days Emotional Quotient (EQ) is believed as the other predictor of people’s success. Poetry as one kind of literary works plays important role dealing with the need to improve students’ Emotional Quotients.

This paper discusses character building’s issues from literature angle. I correlate the literary works with the functions they have in ELT classes. I begin my focus from the role of literary works in ELT to the discussion of character building in a classroom. Literature occupies an important place in language classrooms. It is not only the mode of expression but also a useful and effective resource of language teaching and helps students in fostering their language skills. Carter and Long (1991) show the reason behind the use of literature in ELT classes. They propose three models; a) the cultural model, b) the language model and c) the personal growth model. The cultural model: here, teachers use literary works to introduce foreign custom and culture to their students. The students may increase their understanding of the target culture and foster their imaginative writing shown by the literary works used by their teacher. The language model: this type focuses on the assumption that literature can be used as a tool for language teaching. Literature can be very useful in developing linguistic knowledge both in term of linguistic rules and of effective communication. Literature improves language proficiency since it extends linguistic knowledge through authentic language and situation. The personal growth model: as literary works contain social interaction patterns which use the target language, students are able to study the application of the target language especially through reading and or watching the works. Literary texts portray these in contextualized situation and stimulate students to learn literature which gives awareness and insight to them. This will help students to improve their language proficiencies.

I choose four sorts of poetry; acrostic, cinquain, haiku and tanka, as media of teaching. In this occasion, I use these four poems to improve their English and in the same time to evoke their characters. Lickona (1991) says that character education must be designed to encompass the cognitive, affective and behavioral aspect of morality. Based on this view, teachers, in delivering literary works in their classes should help students firstly in understanding the core value, adopt and commit them and secondly in responding upon them. Teacher can use these teaching stages including debate, discussion, poetry writing, essay writing, role-playing, story-telling and re-telling to prompt and nurture students with target character. Here I use poetry as a media to evoke students’ characters and even to replace some bad ones with new good ones.

It is suggested that teachers are to involve right brain activities in their teaching and learning process. By doing this I believe that students of such classes are able to manage their selves especially when they have to communicate with others.

Keywords:

Character building, literature, poetry, English language teaching.