‘Now You Hear Me’: Contextualized Poetry in Enhancing Literacy and Character Formation

Contextualized poetry is an effective tool to enhance English literacy and moral values and principles for L2 learners. Using descriptive thematic content analysis, this study uncovered the character-building themes and moral reflections of eleventh graders’ close analysis of Now You Hear Me: a contextualized poetry used as an English learning resource in teaching literary analysis. From the prevalent themes of the 54 learners’ outputs, and interrater reliability of Cohen’s Kappa κ=0.79, which manifests substantial agreement, results revealed three emergent character-building themes: accountability, empathy, and self-discipline. These themes resonate a profound and ethical engagement of learners into ecological challenges, which are also viewed as moral imperatives. Thus, this study recommends that English language teachers develop contextualized learning resources such as environmental poetry to enhance writing literacy and promote character formation.