The journals of in-service Hong Kong English teachers: The significance of responses to poetry and its use in schools

At the end of three sixteen week in-service teacher-education courses for primary and secondary school English teachers and English Panel-Chairpersons in June 1994 at the former Institute of Education (now the Bonham Campus of the Hong Kong Institute of Education), 78 teachers agreed that the journals they had kept throughout the course could be used as data for a research project being carried out by a group of tutors. The following December, during the International Language in Education Conference at the University of Hong Kong, these tutors presented a colloquium on journal writing using data collected from the journals. This paper, which formed part of that colloquium, first explains why there was a negative attitude among the teachers towards poetry and its use in schools at the beginning of the course, and then goes on to show how and why there was a change in attitude among fifteen of the teachers towards poetry and its use in the classroom. Copyright © 1995 Language in Education Journal.