Prospective ESL/EFL Teachers’ Perceptions towards Writing Poetry in a Second Language: Difficulty, Value, Emotion, and Attitude

Abstract

The study aims to explore how 18 M.A. TESOL students, who are prospective or experienced ESL/EFLteachers, perceive poetry writing in a second language. A qualitative interview-based design was utilized.Following Iida’s (2012a) analytical framework in examining EFL students’ perceptions toward writinghaiku in English, this current study investigates 18 prospective ESL/EFL teachers’ perspectives throughthe lens of difficulty, value, emotion, and attitude. In order to validate the coding of the interviews, theintraclass correlation coefficient (ICC) test was computed among three interview coders including theprimary researcher, which yields a great agreement rate at .86. The results indicate that while theseprospective ESL/EFL teachers understand writing poetry in a second language involves variousdifficulties, they acknowledge the values of utilizing poetry writing in second language classrooms. Theresults also show that writing poetry in a second language contains both positive and negative emotions,but positive ones are more frequently addressed. Most importantly, the data suggests that writing poetryin a second language is considered as an applicable practice in ESL/EFL language classrooms.© 2018 EJAL & the Authors. Published by Eurasian Journal of Applied Linguistics (EJAL). This is an open-accessarticle distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution license (CC BY-NC-ND)(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).