ABSTRACT
The research reported on and analyzed here reinforces the belief that by using “emancipatory assignments” that require students to employ sociological imagining teachers in ELL classrooms are able to help their students connect their home cultures and first languages with the new culture they are entering by learning its language. In an effort to examine how poetry writing in ELL can serve as a bridge to academic discourse as well as how poetry as a teaching strategy is received by our L2 students, we took our study directly to the ELL classroom where an assignment that engages students' sociological imaginations was used to help students produce a poem in their second language. Our study reports on eight student participants enrolled in a Spring 2018 international section of English composition and examines not only how the writing of poetry employs students' home cultures in learning a new language but also how it serves as an outlet for students' emotional experiences.
