ИСТИНА

For ELT students, a lack of vocabulary necessary to describe nuances of their emotions might make it difficult to express their feelings in English after they have read a poem. Yet, the same task is easily performed in their native tongue. Followers of reader’s response criticism have noticed that different readers, sharing similar cultural, social, and educational background, might use similar words to describe their emotions in response to a literary text. Thus a list of words can be compiled for a set of poems that students of an ELT class are more likely to use describing their feelings. Introducing this list to the class at the beginning of the course facilitates further work with poems. First, students from a sample group are given a poem in the original, if their level of proficiency in English allows it, or in translation into their mother tongue. Their task is to make a list of adjectives, in English or their first-language, which describe their reactions to the reading. The native words are translated into English, then all the mentioned words are ranged in accordance to their frequency and the top 50 are selected. Similar tasks are repeated with other poems. Then all the lists of selected words are combined, at which stage synonyms and antonyms are added to achieve the desired range of the vocabulary. The focus is made on adjectives, though the suggested approach can be used, mutatis mutandis, for other parts of speech and different grammatical constructions as well.