The influence of haiku composition tasks on the development of academic writing skills: a qualitative analysis

The inclusion of literary texts, particularly poetry, is not a common practice in the language classroom. However, the available empirical evidence, albeit relatively scarce, does suggest that poetry, when correctly employed, is likely to be beneficial for second and foreign language learners. This teaching material has been used to teach and develop areas such as vocabulary acquisition, grammar practice, and even motivation as well as the four macro-skills in language, namely listening, speaking, reading, and writing. The use of poetry in language instruction emphasizes the predominant role of learners in authentic literary production. As such, this research paper focuses on the qualitative aspect of a mixed-methods study about the effects of haiku composition tasks on the development of academic writing skills. The participants of the study were 30 English as a foreign language (EFL) pre-service teachers. As part of the data collection process, the participating students were asked to write short argumentative essays at the beginning and at the end of a six-week intervention that promoted the composition of haiku. After the intervention, an open-ended questionnaire was administered to identify and describe the participants’ perceptions regarding how haiku composition influenced their academic writing skills. The results of the study show that the great majority of the participants agreed that haiku composition furthered the development of their academic writing skills and vocabulary acquisition. The findings of the study corroborate the existing experimental findings as to the value of poetry-based tasks for second and foreign language learning. Thus, we conclude that the inclusion of poetry in the language classroom ought to be promoted through activities that, while being personal and meaningful to the students, allow for the development of language proficiency.