The following are some simple poem forms with which students will probably already be familiar. This is really just a starting point, and as we encourage our students to explore and create, so can we explore different poem forms and create great new application opportunities for our students.
"Hello, Goodbye" Poems
These poems are super simple, and great for beginning language students! Just have students make a series of couplets in which the first line says "Hello" followed by a noun and the second line says "Goodbye" followed by another, related noun. You can play with this by having some use
Bonjour / Au revoir
and others use more casual forms like
Salut
and
Tchao/Ciao
. Note, since
salut
and
tchao/ciao
are used as both greetings and leave-takings, it will be important to check for that understanding when using them.
Use this poem form for practicing opposites. For example, when learning the weather, dates, and seasons, students could create poems that range from
Bonjour mars / Au revoir février
, with a very simple, non-rhyming connection between two consecutive months, to
Bonjour, printemps / Au revoir neige,
where there is no rhyme and ideas are connected by an understanding of what weather conditions occur in each season, to
Bonjour, il fait du soleil / Au revoir, il fait froid
which replaces the noun with a verb phrase to become a little more conceptually complex, and also has different rhyme correspondances to explore (
f
ait
/so
leil
and
Au rev
oir
/fr
oid
).
A note on definite articles: As we are personifying these nouns, they become names and as such, the definite article is omitted. Additionally, the definite article is omitted when addressing someone, as in
Bonjour, docteur X
and not
Bonjour, le docteur X
. This runs contrary to the general rule, which I strongly emphasize with my students, that they must always use the definite article, even where it is not needed in English. For example, we must say
J'aime le chocolat
and not
J'aime chocolat
. One way to make the distinction more clear is to capitalize the nouns, since we are personifying them. Then it would make more sense as to why the article is omitted. Students will enjoy examples in which you use their names to clarify that "We don't say
Bonjour,
le
Tyrese or
Au revoir,
la
Shelley, do we?"
Anaphora
With all of its
Bonjours
and
Au revoirs,
the preceding poem form employs a poetic device called
anaphora,
the repetition of a word or phrase at the beginning of several lines. Although I wouldn't recommend introducing the actual term as such in the course of this unit,
anaphora
can certainly be used to write a variety of poems throughout this unit. Another example of anaphora can be found in the poem
Il était une feuille (Once there was a leaf)
by Robert Desnos [http://www.paperblog.fr/2682447/il-etait-une-feuille-robert-desnos/]. In it, the phrase
Il était
is repeated four times, each time it introduces a different part of a tree, and is followed by several short lines of description. This technique can be used to write poems that reinforce often-used phrases, like those expressing likes (
J'aime…)
or wants (
Je veux… / Je voudrais…)
. Opposing concepts can be paired, so that a line about a like can be followed by an opposite dislike. This technique can also be used to practice confusing vocabulary expressions like
J'ai mal à + body part
to express having a pain in a particular body part (as in
J'ai mal à la títe
for
I have "bad" in the head,
or
a headache
.) In this way learned vocabulary is also reviewed.
Sometimes you will find poems that you don't necessarily want to use in class but that model great techniques. There is nothing wrong with following a style that you notice but changing it to suit your needs. For example, Phillipe Soupault's
Donnez-moi
[http://ecprim.lefuilet.free.fr/s.htm#soupault] uses anaphora in repeating the line
Donnez-moi je vous prie (Give me please)
and following it with different (plural) items using the possessive adjective
vos (your)
. While I don't want to share this particular poem in class, I like the style and so I would create a poem template with a similar pattern. Just be sure that you acknowledge the original poem on any structure/direction sheet you create, to give credit where credit is due!
See the section on "Dictionary Skills and Writing Anaphoristic Poetry" for a way to use anaphora to teach and practice using English-French dictionaries.
Name Acrostics
A name acrostic is formed by writing one's name vertically down a page, and choosing an adjective beginning with each letter of the name that describes the person whose name is being used. It is clearly a more visual form and can be used to complement the other, more sound-based forms. These are good starting points, and good support tools for students who may be struggling with more involved poem forms. Depending on what stage of language acquisition students are at, this can be a great way to introduce and practice the French grammar rule that adjectives must match the noun in gender and number. At very early stages though, this will be too complex, and so to modify the form you can have students make a name acrostic comprised of nouns, like favorites within a category of words (favorite foods, for example). Students can color code their nouns to indicate which are masculine and which are feminine (and perhaps underlining those that are plural.)
Sometimes students will not be able to find something that starts with a letter that they actually like, so you can offer solutions like adding happy or sad faces after each item according to preference, and having students convey that feeling through recitation of the poem. Or you could teach phrases for
Yum (miam-miam!)
and
Yuck (beurk!)
to add after each item, which gives students real-world conversational conventions and fillers as well as adds a great element of fun. Or they could add familiar phrases like
J'aime /Je n'aime pas
applied appropriately according to language level (more advanced students could practice changing from the singular form of the word to the plural form when necessary, as in
Mangue – J'aime
les
mangue
s
. Or the concept of direct object pronouns can be practiced be jumping to
Mangue – Je l'aime
or
Mangues – Je les aime
. For instances where no word in the category can be found, you can either have students use an unrelated word, or else you can think of a clever, fun phrase to substitute. For example, with a missing X-word,
Oh là là, pas de X! (Oh my! No X!)
or, borrowing from a children's song to teach French called
Comment t'appelles-tu?
you could use a nonsense phrase like
X – X- ah – bela – chambu
. Or students could simply repeat the letter several times (
X X X X.)
For another variation on this form, instead of drawing from themed vocabulary, students can pull from all the vocabulary they know to choose nouns in any category with which they identify or that hold special meaning to them. This can also be used for dictionary practice. Later on down the line, the same poems can then be used to practice gender matching, as students can add adjectives to their poems.
Cinquains
A cinquain is a simple, five line poem made up of words rather than sentences, so it is a great form for this unit. There are different ways to write a cinquain, but for our purposes, I would stick to a clear structure, such as the following:
Line 1: Noun
Line 2: Two adjectives that describe the noun in Line 1
Line 3: Three verbs associated with the noun
Line 4: Four words (or a phrase) reflecting how you feel about the noun
Line 5: Either repeat the noun or replace it with another synonymous noun
Additionally, you can ask students ready for more of a challenge to consider the number of syllables in each line:
Line 1: 2 syllables
Line 2: 4 syllables
Line 3: 6 syllables
Line 4: 8 syllables
Line 5: 2 syllables
