Wordplay: The Poem's Second Language

Students’ relationships with language are likely to change when they are permitted to play with it, but teachers must construct multiple classroom situations for experimentation, and thus change, to take place. Margo A. Figgins and Jenny Johnson give several ideas for how to foster wordplay among students, describing use of eponyms, word invention, surrealist activities, and a word lottery to “cultivate more excited attitudes toward language study.”