Hi Frankie,
Yes, Paul was simplifying a bit: the iambic rhythm is daDUM daDUM daDUM and is one of the basic rhythms of English.
For me as an English teacher it's essential to get students to feel this. It's very difficult for students whose native language has a quite different rhythm and is not "stress timed". It's not an intellectual learning process it's a question of feeling and breathing.
That's why I agree very much with you that using poems can help student to feel the rhythms. However, most of the students I deal with don't have the level of English to understand the "great" poems and if they're puzzled about the meaning they won't be attending to the rhythm. So I use quite quite different "poems": limericks.
Even in the classroom face to face, it takes a long time to get students to change the way they make sounds come out of their mouths . I have managed to make exercises with limericks on Moodle but they're just a complement to what I do in the classroom. Here's one : The lady from Ryde It's part of a set of exercises and each poem has an exercise on stress and one on the schwa. But this is a bit technical for this forum - not eveyone's an English teacher here and knows what a schwa is - maybe it should be continued over in Lang Teaching.
Cheers,
Glenys
