Alan Maley is a renowned English Language Teaching (ELT) expert, prolific author, and leading propagator of humanistic language teaching who contributes regularly to HLTmag.

 

Alphabet poems

The idea is simple.  Students work in pairs to write an alphabet poem on a given theme.  In the example below, the topic is finding excuses for something. But the topic can be varied to suit the needs of the class.  Each line begins with and contains words beginning with the letters of the alphabet, in order.

 

Related ideas

Poems based on the letters of the alphabet are just one of the structures you can use.  You can also base poems on the days of the week, the hours of the day, the seasons of the year, the days of a festival (e.g. the twelve days of Christmas), the holidays in a year, the places in the town, the rooms in a house, the members of a family or a team, the parts of the body, items of clothing or food, etc.

Whichever structure you use, it leads students to explore English vocabulary actively.  It works best if they are given access to a dictionary or thesaurus.

 

Example: Poem based on the letters of the alphabet

The Alphabet of Excuses for Writers’ Block. Alan Maley.

It’s because I feel apathetic, ambivalent, antagonistic, aggravated, angry and anxious,

anachronistic and I’m suffering from angst and accidie…

and I’m burnt out, boozed, barmy, bone-idle and brain-dead.

What’s more, I’m a crazy, catatonic, catastrophic, corpulent clot,

and a depressed, defective, destructive, delinquent, duplicitous, dense dolt.

I feel eccentric, ethereal, entitled, estranged, entangled, exhausted and empty,

as well as being a futile, furious, fractious freak and a furtive old fart.

I’m grumpy, gormless, goofy and ghastly.

And now I’m feeling hot, hopeless, hag-ridden, hen-pecked, hurt and humiliated, and have

the heeby-jeebies and hyper-tension of the brain.

I’m inarticulate, incompetent, indecisive, inhibited, impractical – and in bed.

I’m a joke, a juvenile jerk, a jackass, a junkie …

who is a kinky, know-nothing kid who has eaten stale kippers with too much ketchup.

I feel lackadaisical, laid back, loopy and legitimately lazy.

I’m myopic and suffering from mange, mastitis, measles, mental mould and meningitis.

I’m just nervous, noxious, negative and nasty.

And quite frankly I’m obstinate, obstreperous, ominously other-worldly,

and right now I’m paralytic from prosecco,

and suffering from pins and needles and a plague of procrastination,

which make me feel queasy and quaintly quirky.

I’m too busy resting and recuperating

after the shenanigans of shopping, now I’m shirking and skiving.

I can’t take any more: I’ve got ticks, twinges and tinnitus.

I’m upset, untidy, utterly unready.

And now I’m feeling vengeful, vituperative, vindictive and vaguely vulgar.

What’s more, I’m completely woozy, worm-eaten and worn-out.

And anyway, I’m xenophobic and x-factored,

and I’ve been yachting, yanking yards of yarn, since yesterday,

so I’m zonked and feel like a zombie.

But most of all – it’s because I am me.

 

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