Can poetry also help develop learners' linguistic creativity? We believe it can, especially in terms of their vocabulary knowledge.

We believe this to be the case because of the depth of 'involvement' (Laufer & Hulstijn, 2001) that poetry often demands, especially if learners are asked to respond on an emotional level to the poem. In addition, by using novel combinations of words, poetry can prompt learners to work hard to work out what they mean, with potential benefits for their learning as they process the language more deeply.

However, there is relatively little research into the impact of using literature in general, and poetry in particular, on school age learners' language development. It seems likely that its impact will depend a lot on how it is used, and what kind of teaching approaches are used with it.

On page 164 of our chapter, "Getting creative in the languages classroom" in Creative Multilingualism: A Manifesto (2020), we argue as follows:

Previous research has not only concentrated on the use of literature with adult learners but has rarely directly compared the use of literary and non-literary texts. Nor has it considered to any great extent the impact of how each kind of text is used.

We therefore decided to conduct a study in which we compared using literary and non-literary texts, where we also compared teaching approach with each text type.

Try to imagine what design such a study might take. How might you go about planning it? Make some notes and then compare them with the next section.