On the Power of Poetry Reading in Improving Iranian EFL Learners’ Critical Reading Skills

This study investigated the effect of employing poetry reading tasks on improving Iranian EFL intermediate learners’ critical reading skills. The basic contribution of this study is to underline a certain type of poetry, haiku, which is of great value in fostering critical reading skills. The study was conducted with 60 female students learning English at Kish Mehr institute in Qazvin (Iran). The students all at the intermediate level were divided into two groups. This level was focused on because of the presupposition on the part of the researcher that upper intermediate and advanced learners might have already acquired critical thinking skills and the elementary and pre-intermediate students due to the low language proficiency level seem not to be able to learn this type of reading skill thoroughly. The participants were divided into two groups: haiku poetry reading group and traditional reading group. The two groups chosen randomly were taught separately. For poetry reading group, Haiku was employed along with critical reading skills. Haiku was chosen, for it is a kind of visual poetry which depicts attitudes, feelings and aspects of everyday life through breathtakingly beautiful poetical images. Furthermore, the Select Reading book which contains various ordinary texts was taught to the second group. After treatment and at the end of semester, a post-test was applied to measure progress in the students’ critical reading skills. A t-test was utilized to compare the performance of two groups. The analysis indicated that the haiku poetry reading students did significantly better than the traditional reading group. The major findings of this study suggests that employing poetry reading tasks helps significantly to enhance Iranian EFL intermediate learners’ critical reading skills. Based upon the conclusions drawn from the study, haiku poetry is thus recommended to be integrated into EFL/ESL Curriculum.