Teachers’ and Students’ Perception of Poetry Teaching and Learning in Class VI of Rangaytung Primary School, Chhukha Dzongkhag

Abstract

The poetry question of class VI is marked out of 8 both in the mid-term as well as in the annual examination according to the Instructional Guide for English, classes IV-VI, of which the poem should be from outside the prescribed English textbook. After studying the marks scored by 14 students of class VI of Rangaytung Primary School, Chhukha in the annual examination, 2022, more than 75% of the students on average scored below 4 out of 8 in poetry. Therefore, this study found the perception of teachers and students in terms of lack of appropriate content in the selection of poems in the prescribed class VI English textbook. The study also touched on the difficulties faced by teachers and students in the teaching and learning of poetry in the classroom. The participants for the study were selected based on purposive sampling. The study adopted qualitative research design to collect data from the field. Qualitative thematic analysis was used to interpret the collected data. The findings of this study include lack of appropriate content in the selection of poems in the prescribed class VI English textbook. One of the major difficulties that the teachers faced was students’ lack of comprehension skills in poetry because of the lack of poetry reading at school as well as at home. The students also found it difficult to understand the meaning of new words and pronounce difficult words from the poems because of various reasons. Keeping all difficulties aside, the teacher played a crucial role in making poetry learning interesting to the children. Recommendations to subject specialists, curriculum developers and English teachers of class VI are discussed separately towards the end of the fifth chapter.