Technology and Poetry: Pathway to Designing a Popularist English App from a Teacher's Perspective

In English language education, pronunciation teaching is quite a first area to take advantage of affordances given by software, websites and mobile-based technology. The scope of pronunciation instruction, however, can be broadened to include other English knowledge domains. Poetry reading, which is a form of performance-assisted learning, is perfectly suited to allow learners to reframe the purpose of learning English pronunciation. Poetry reading involves reading with meaning. Poems are particularly suitable for introducing the interfaces among words, intonation, and emotions, as well as the linguistic and socio-pragmatic knowledge embedded in these texts.

This presentation is told from the perspective of teachers-turned-app-designers. In this endeavour, our team builds a mobile-based app for poetry leisure learning, placing something that is commonly seen as remote as well as on the periphery of the English curriculum into the palms of English learners. In this presentation, we will focus on how the team combines theory and practice in the app design process, the ways in which this tool is aligned with general user expectations, and its relevance to theories of technology-assisted language teaching and learning.