Statement of intent

LITERATURE REVIEW

Motivation is the best key in teaching language. While teaching it claims us to learn how to motivate students. Students who are not motivated will not learn effectively. It is often used to describe certain sorts of behaviour. Every teacher should feel, stick to their mind and apply into practice this: the more motivation teacher gives, the more knowledge students get. Reeve(1996)⁴ explains that learner who studies hard, immerses to learn as being "highly motivated", while his friends may say that "finding it hard to get motivated". Such statements mean that motivation has a great role in our behavior changing.

Keeping students motivated to learn is one of the biggest challenges any teacher faces.William Littlewood (1987) ⁵ points out: the first step in tackling the problem of motivation is that the teachers need to understand and appreciate the role and importance of motivation in any learning. In the context of second language learning, he also observes that in second language learning as in every other field of human learning, motivation is the critical force which determines whether a learner embarks on a task at all, how much energy he devotes to it, and how long he perseveres. It is a complex phenomenon and includes many components: the individual’s drive, need for achievement and success, curiosity, desire for stimulation and new experience, and so on. These factors play a role in every kind of learning situation.

In teaching foreign language motivating students through collaborative writing poems stays on the highest rank. The communication requirements of the writing task are: task division, brainstorming, editing, general discussion, and goal setting. Task division relates to assigning tasks and communicating the associated requirements and deadlines. Brainstorming is generating and recording ideas to be used in production of the text. Collaborative poetry is an alternative and creative technique for writing poetry by more than one person. The principal aim of collaborative poetry is to create poems with multiple collaborations from various authors. In a common example of collaborative poetry, there may be numerous authors working in conjunction with one another to try to form a unified voice that can still maintain their individual voices. Writing poetry is a great exercise for English language learners. It gives them a chance to experiment with language and vocabulary, and to freely share their ideas without the confinement of perfect grammar or firm structures.

By means of teaching poems teacher can gain lots of objectives such as improving students’ listening, speaking and writing skills, particularly, creativity and logical thinking capacities. In order to show and enhance creativity students should have a huge of vocabulary base.

Some learners have a low curiosity in learning vocabulary. This makes them have less confidence in learning English well and writing poems collaborative. It will even make them gradually give up studying English. The question “how to make younger students no longer feel and fear it is boring to learn vocabulary and implement their vocabulary base?” it is really worth for discussing from the teacher’s point of view. Millis⁶ claims that good communication and cooperation between teachers and learners are beneficial for teaching students vocabulary words.

I.1.THE IMPORTANCE OF GIVING MOTIVATION

Before sharing our stance about the importance of giving motivation to students in teaching process, we should understand what is motivation itself, why do we need to persuade them acquiring knowledge, learning languages. Without it can’t we conduct our lesson, can’t we achieve our purpose?

Motivation is a theoretical construct used to explain behavior. Elliot, AndrewJ ⁷ said : it gives the reason for people’s actions, desires, and needs.

Motivation can also be defined as one’s direction to behaviour, or what causes a person to want to repeat a behavior or vice versa. Pardee, R.L ⁸ belives that a motive is prompt that person can act in a certain way, or at least develop an inclination for specific behavior.

From their own experience every teacher can respond to these sort of questions like this: the more motivation teacher gives, the more knowledge students get. Motivation is often used to describe certain sorts of behaviour. Learner who studies hard, immerses to learn and tries for top grades may be described as being motivated, while his friends may say that "finding it hard to get motivated". Such statements mean that motivation has a great role in our behavior changing. William Littlewood points out: the first step in tackling the problem of motivation is that the teachers need to understand and appreciate the role and importance of motivation in any learning. According to the Reeve ⁹ theory that:“Student motivation is influenced by both internal and external factors that can start, sustain, intensify, or discourage behaviour” .The teacher has to activate these motivational components in the students but that is the precise problem

Learners who are not inspired can not acquire productively. They do not want to listen your information and lecture, participate in your task if you do not have a desire of giving stimulation. A student may be unmotivated for a variety of reasons they actually have challenges learning and have need of special attention..

Motivated students are more excited to learn and participate. Teaching a class full of motivated students is enjoyable for teacher and student alike. Some students are self-motivated, with a natural love of learning. But even with the students who do not have this natural capacity, a great teacher should make them learning and motivate them to reach their full energy.

I.2. WHICH TIPS SHOULD BE IMPLEMENTED TO MOTIVATE STUDENTS?

It is believed that knowing your students also will help you learn how to motivate your students. Everything does not work for every student. Some children do not like to be praised in front of their peers. Sometimes you have to pull them out of the class and praise them or call their parents and praise them by telling their parents about their work. Keeping your students motivated to learn is one of the biggest challenges any teacher faces. Accounting to this position we will try to give brilliant advice and recommendations you to bring a great deal can be gained:

1. Give stimulation to Students. You should encourage open communication and free thinking with your students to make them feel important. Be enthusiastic. Praise your students often. Recognize them for their contributions. If your classroom is a friendly place where students feel heard and respected, they will be more eager to learn.

2. Get Them Involved. An easy way to encourage students and teach them responsibility is to get them involved in the classroom. Make participating fun by giving each student a job to do. Give students the responsibility of decorating the classroom. If you are going over a reading in class, ask students to take turns reading sections out loud. Giving students a sense of ownership allows them to feel accomplished and encourages active participation in class.

3. Offer stimulation. Offering students small incentives makes learning effectively and motivates students to push themselves. Incentives can range from small to large giving a special privilege to an exemplary student. Rewards give students a sense of accomplishment and encourage them to work with a goal in mind.

4. Get Creative. Avoid being in the same position by changing around the structure of your class. Teach through games and discussions instead of lectures, encourage students to debate and enrich the subject matter with visual aids, like colorful charts, diagrams and videos. You can even show a movie that effectively illustrates a topic or theme. Your physical classroom should never be boring: use posters, models, student projects and seasonal themes to decorate your classroom, and create a warm, stimulating environment.

5. Apply connections in Real Life. If your student does not grasp that what they’re learning is vital, they won’t want to learn, so it’s important to demonstrate connections how to be linked to hem. Really amaze them by telling them that they may use it in their career. Showing them that a subject is used everyday. Besides that, teacher try to utilize students’ name very often, pay attention to their strengths and weaknesses. Give praise them for their strength and reinforce these weaknesses with pleasure without being in a lazy mood. It claims for them review the learning objectives with their students. Teachers need to be sure students know what they are expected to learn, do and know. In addition to these, teacher should not only stay at just one place , but also they move around the room when they teach. Teachers encourage students to share their ideas and comments, even if they are incorrect. They'll never know what students don't understand unless they ask them, maintain eye contact and move toward their students as they interact with them, nod their heads to show that teachers are listening to students.

It is always asked whether we should correct all students’ errors, whenever they occur. The reasonable answer is that if we stop at every single error and treat it with no room for errors to take place, this will lead to a gap of communication and students will be too much afraid of making mistakes. Students will be too much hesitant to participate. Thus, teachers should be aware of when to correct errors and how to do that without any hurt and humiliation.

6. The Error Correction . It is always asked whether we should correct all students’ errors, whenever they occur. The reasonable answer is that if we stop at every single error and treat it with no room for errors to take place, this will lead to a gap of communication and students will be too much afraid of making mistakes, students will be too much reluctant to participate. Thus, Teachers should be aware of when to correct errors and how to do that without any hurt and humiliation. Concerning the ways of how to correct errors, there are several techniques which the teacher, who is seen as the monitor, should choose from them according to the type of the error and task where the incorrect form of language occurs. Among these ways of correction we can state: self correction, peer correction and teacher correction.

   7. Implementing role play. This is also useful another technique to vary the pace the lesson and to respond to the fundamental notion of variety in teaching. Teachers are advised to use the role- play activity in order to motivate their students and to help the less motivated learners take part in the lesson. As good examples of that we can state: the hide and guessing game, dramatizing an interview of customer and shop assistant, doctor and patient conversation.

I.3. THEORY AND PRACTICE IN TEACHING COLLABORATIVE WRITING.

There are a plenty of theories invited by scientists to collaboration.

Collaboration is a phenomenon which implies to work together with another person or group to achieve something , especially in science or art. In a true collaborative environment, each contributor has an almost equal ability to add, edit, and remove text. It is easier to do if the group has a specific goal in mind and harder if a goal is absent or vague. Farkas (1991)¹⁰ states collaboration is:

two or more people jointly composing the complete text of a document;

two or more people contributing components to a document;

one or more person modifying, by editing and/or reviewing, the document of one or more persons; and one person working interactively with one or more person and drafting a document based on the ideas of the person or persons.

Ritchie and Rigano¹¹ described three types of collaborating used in the academic setting:

Turn writing. In this form of writing, which is more cooperative than collaborative, authors contribute different sections of a text which are then merged and harmonized by a lead author.

Lead writing. One person drafts the text, which is amended by the others.

Writing together side-by-side. A text is composed by two or more persons who think aloud together, negotiating and refining the content. One of the authors serves as scribe and possibly also as "gatekeeper of text composition".

Collaborative writing has been the subject of academic research for over two decades. A number of authors have written on the subject, and each have slightly different views on the strategies for collaborative writing.

According to Lowry et al.,¹² there are five collaborative writing strategies:

Single-author writing occurs when one team member writes as a representative for the entire team. Single-author writing usually occurs when the writing task is simple.

Sequential single writing. In sequential single-author writing, one group member writes at a time. Each group member is assigned a portion of the document, writes his or her portion and then passes the document onto the next group member.

Parallel writing is the type of collaborative writing that occurs when a group divides the assignment or document into separate parts and all members work on their assigned part at the same time. Reactive writing occurs when team members collaborate synchronously to develop their product. Team members react to and adjust each other's contributions as they are made.

Mixed mode. This term describes a form of writing that mixes two or more of the collaborative writing strategies described above.

Based on the results of the study conducted by Ede and Lunsford,¹³ there are seven organizational patterns for collaborative authoring: The team plans and outlines the task, each writer prepares his or her part, and the group compiles the individual parts and revises the whole document as needed; The team plans and outlines the writing task, one member prepares a draft, and the team edits and revises the draft;

1.One member of the team plans and writes a draft, then the group revises the draft;

2.One person plans and writes the draft, then one or more members revise the draft without consulting the original authors;

3.The group plans and writes the draft, one or more members revise the draft without consulting the original authors;

4.One person assigns the tasks, each member completes the individual task, and one person compiles and revises the document;

5.One dictates, another transcribes and edits.

I.4. HOW TO TEACH ENGLISH THROUGH POEMS

The reading and writing of poetry, classified as a literary activity, has helped to keep this form of linguistic expression out of the typical foreign language classroom. While many teachers agree that poetry promotes language acquisition, they will also add that poetic concepts and cultural assumptions are usually too difficult for foreign language learners to take on. While this might be true of poetry as a reading activity, however, the use of poetry in the writing class can provide an effective and collaborative means of language learning and of personal expression. Simple forms can give students a framework for expressing ideas that are meaningful to them, without the constraints of grammatical accuracy. It is very hard to teach students in class where most of them are not able to say even the simplest sentence, as they do not know completely grammar rules or structure. The same problem is with reading - students do not want to read aloud because of their poor pronunciation, they do not want to read silently either, because they are not able to understand the text or remember vocabulary.. It was very difficult to plan the lessons and to teach the pupils, because they had so many problems, that sometimes the teacher doesn’t know what to begin with. Teenage students who start learning a second language meet certain barriers. Many of them are too shy to repeat the same words many times in the presence of other students in the classroom. So, they would rather not say a word than be wrong or incorrect. They do not practice and do not improve their language. Finding ways to break down their fear is very important, for it makes it possible to teach them a foreign language and make them learn all by themselves.

Actually, teachers tend to utilize various activities in order to make their lesson interesting. One of them is using poem. Poems should be learnt only when the learners understand the meaning of the language items contained in them. Sometimes the theme of the poem or even its cultural background should be introduced or the new vocabulary and the structures should be practiced in advance. A further assumption regarding the studying and writing of poetry is that it is an individual activity. This paper, however, takes an interactive, collaborative

approach, and describes how poems can be used to promote cooperation and communication as well as individual expression, in the EFL classroom. Moore (2002) clarifies that by inviting students to be “in the poem” actively reading poems in pairs or other small groupings, and creating ideas together, poetry can become an integral part of the EFL classroom and can be a means of investigating issues relevant to the students’ backgrounds, experiences, and attitudes.

Poems, like songs, contextualize a vocabulary lesson effectively. Since poetry is often spoken, repeated, dealt with, and considered, it acts as an effective tool for practicing specific phrases. Through repeating and considering the poem, the words become more deeply understandable. Thus, poetry not only provides a rewarding resource for practice of vocabulary, but also a proper basis for review. Celce-Murcia and Hills(1988) ¹⁴ point out that if a poem that exemplifies a particular structure is also a good poem, it engages the eye, the ear and the tongue simultaneously while also stimulating and moving us; this polymorphic effect makes poetry easier to memorize than other things for many students. Like songs, poems exaggerate the rhythmic nature of the language. Thus it is an important aspect to be taught, since English is a syllable timed language with stressed syllables being spoken at roughly equal time pauses, even in everyday speech. Similar to songs, poems have an enormous linguistic value as they provide authenticity and cultural views. A poem's capacity to comfort the reader or the listener also increases its effectiveness as a teaching resource. Once a poem or song has been learned, they stay in the minds of the students for the rest of their lives, with all the rhythms, grammatical features and vocabulary.

Poems may bring the use of creativity and the rhythm into the language classroom, though they may also bring some difficulties. Poems are not constructed in a simple way and syntactically they are at a higher level than prose, thus it might be very difficult for a foreign language learner to comprehend them completely. As stated by Povey¹⁵ there are three main barriers for literature including poetry. They are linguistic, cultural, and intellectual barriers. Linguistic difficulties are the problems caused by the syntax or the lexicon of the poem. Cultural difficulties include imagery, tone, and allusion. At the intellectual level, the students should be intellectual and mature enough to understand the theme of the poem. These difficulties could be easily removed if the teacher provides a poem which is syntactically and thematically appropriate to the level, age and the interests of the students. Thus, by removing or minimizing the potential problems, poetry can provide an enormously rich, enjoyable and authentic context for foreign language learners.

In the selection of a poem, the teacher should first consider the topic of vocabulary to be presented, practiced, or reviewed, then the level and the age of the students, next the suitable grammar and the length of the poem and its appropriateness to the classroom objectives. It is advisable to select a poem from 20th century poets. As older poems often provide a more difficult lexicon and syntax, and as they reflect some old-fashioned ideas, it is more convenient to use contemporary poems than older ones. Poems, which reflect cultural themes, universal features, humanistic values, or emotional aspects, will be more relevant to the foreign language learners. Finally, through taking the classroom objectives into consideration, a teacher should effectively benefit from poems as teaching aids. It is attempted to indicate how poems and poetry-related activities might enhance English language learning at middle school and high-school level. It is suggested that a focus on the beauty of the words of the target language and on their student-directed use in non-grammatical as well as in grammatical contexts, can promote meaningful and relevant expression of personal meanings, in addition to focusing on particular aspects of structure and syntax.

I.5. THE EFFECTIVENESS OF COLLABORATIVE WRITING POEMS IN EFL CLASSES.

Poetry offers wonderful opportunities for reading, writing, speaking, and listening practice for EFL classess. Poetry also gives students a chance to expand vocabulary knowledge, to play with language, and to work with different rhythms and rhyme patterns. The benefits of using poetry are not simply anecdotal, however — they have been well documented. Dr. Janette Hughes¹⁶ demonstrates the positive effects of poetry on literacy development. Also Dr. Hughes points out, "paying attention to vocabulary and rhythm develops oral language skills," and the development of oral language skills has a strong correlation to proficiency in reading.

Kristina Robertson¹⁷ said that writing poetry is a great exercise for students in EFL classes.. It gives them a chance to experiment with language and vocabulary, and to freely share their ideas without the confinement of perfect grammar or firm structures.

Creating poems with the students is one way of developing speaking and writing skills. Actually, creating stories, poems is grounded in the students’ ability to create a story, a poem from their personal experience. In creating poems some issues are revealed such as: a) fluency, b) whether the students have enough language to create the poem, and c) accuracy.

Teachers are able to demonstrate techniques of using poems in different ways to teach grammar, vocabulary, pronunciation and community building because the students like poems and they motivate the students to learn the English language in an interesting way. Teachers can elicit students’ ideas about the poem through activities such as prediction, mind maps, word splashes, etc. Students discuss questions such as the feelings in the poems, what will happen next, etc. and write their responses in an interesting manner. Students may write and present how the poem makes them feel and then draw a picture of their feelings while reading and writing to the poem. Teachers respond to this presentation and ask questions. Then, feedback is provided from the group.

Collaborative or collective poetry is an alternative and creative technique for writing poems more than one person. The principal aim of collaborative poetry is to create poems with multiple collaborations from various authors. In a common example of collaborative poetry, there may be numerous authors working in conjunction with one another to try to form a unified voice that can still maintain their individual voices.

There are a lot of effectiveness of writing poems collaborative in EFL classes. Here are given some of them.

Collaborative groups draw upon the strengths of all their members. Although one student may be stronger in critical thinking skills, another may excel in organizing. By working in groups, students learn from each other while they complete assigned tasks.

More and more workplace activities involve project teams. Giving students opportunities to work collaboratively on academic projects can help prepare them for the advantages and pitfalls of collaborative work on the job.

Students working in collaborative groups can take advantage of group members for built-in peer review as they complete writing projects. Not least important, collaborative writing assignments usually entail much less grading time for the instructor. Writing poetry is a great exercise for English language learners. It gives them a chance to experiment with language and vocabulary, and to freely share their ideas without the confinement of perfect grammar or firm structures. They may very well welcome this opportunity to create heartfelt poems to share with their classmates and family.

Here are some suggestions for getting started: