Document Type : Original Article

Author

• Parigul Nabizadah

Afghanistan

Abstract

The current study explores EFL Afghan students' attitudes towards writing English poetry. This study aims to investigate how EFL Afghan students perceive writing poetry by examining four basic themes (difficulty, value, emotion, and attitude) adopted from Iida's (2012a) research. This study has a qualitative design. The study participants were selected from the English department of Language and Literature Faculty at Herat University, Afghanistan. The data were analyzed through a coding system. The coded data's reliability was computed using SPSS statistical package version 26. The inter-rater reliability of the Correlation coefficient estimated agreement across raters of (r=.89) demonstrates a significantly high correlational value between the raters. The results showed that Afghan EFL students have positive attitudes toward writing English poetry. The findings revealed some reasons (such as expressing emotions and thoughts, enjoyment, discovering abilities, confidence, and enriching the vocabulary and language skills) that make Afghan EFL students willing to write poetry in the English language. However, some obstacles (such as the word choice, the poem's structure, self-expression, self- doubting, frustration, lack of knowledge, and previous learning experiences) make Afghan EFL students reluctant to write English poetry. The finding also reported a significantly high correlation between Afghan EFL students and Liao's (2018) study on EFL/ESL M.A. TESOL students' perception. The study concluded with some implications.

Keywords

• Poetry
• Attitudes
• EFL
• qualitative
• correlation