ИСТИНА

Contemporary poetry gives students an insight into culture and has a great ability to inspire them and stimulate their creativity. However, advanced learners of English usually concentrate on specific targets they want to achieve: obtaining a certificate, passing a test successfully, etc., thus viewing reading poetry as a distraction. The principle of indirect goal setting may bridge the gap between the potential of contemporary poetry and common misconceptions in learners’ attitude to it. It distinguishes the goal of a linguistic activity that is evident to the students and its secondary goal. Thus, it allows organising the work with poetic texts in such a way that all the exercises are based on different grammar phenomena and aimed at training grammar skills, but performing the tasks leads the students to a better understanding and deeper appreciation of the poems. All the exercises can be divided into two types: those that require reconstructing the previously changed text of the poem and those where the task is to modify the text. The former can be most efficient when the task is to put words in the poem in the suitable grammatical form. The latter suits best narrative poems as it consists in rendering the poem in changed circumstances (where the narrator, the tense or the viewpoint is modified). Prompts can be provided to facilitate the students’ work. The talk provides examples of all the types of the suggested exercises, developed with the texts of modern British and US poems.