Haiku Across Borders

Drawing on a total of 8,308 haiku poems written by 834 English as a foreign language (EFL) university students in Japan, this book explores the value, possibility, and potential of teaching and researching English-language haiku in second and foreign language (SFL) contexts.

The book showcases how haiku is used and taught in the SFL classroom and discusses how the task of reading and writing English-language haiku promotes SFL learning. More specifically, it addresses these questions:

• What are the textual features of English-language haiku produced by EFL students?
• How do EFL students read and interpret English-language haiku?
• What knowledge and skills do EFL students gain through the task of reading and writing English-language haiku?
• What are the perceptions and attitudes of EFL students in relation to the task of reading and writing haiku in the English classroom?
• How can English-language haiku be used as a research methodology?

With empirical evidence from both quantitative and qualitative data, this book moves the field forward by addressing the methodological and pedagogical issues in relation to the use of poetry writing in SFL teaching and learning. The uniqueness of this book lies in its applicability and practicality both in methodological and pedagogical approaches to haiku writing that students, researchers, and teachers in applied linguistics can replicate in diverse teaching contexts.

Atsushi Iida (Ph.D. Indiana University of Pennsylvania) is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at Aoyama Gakuin University, where he teaches courses in TESOL and applied linguistics. His research explores second language writing, poetry writing, voice and identity, and literature in second language education. He has published widely in international journals and is the co-editor (with Bee Chamcharatsri) of International Perspectives on Creative Writing in Second Language Education: Supporting Language Learners’ Proficiency, Identity and Creative Expression (Routledge, 2022).