201 USING A “PROSING POEM” STRATEGY IN TEACHING POETRY IN THE EFL CONTEXT OF INDONESIA M. Misbahul Amri a ; Yazid Basthomi b ( a m.misbahul.fs@um.ac.id; b ybasthomi@um.ac.id) Universitas Negeri Malang Jl. Semarang No. 5 Malang, 65145, East Java, Indonesia Abstract: The present article reports our reflections on how to teach an introductory course on poetry in an Indonesian tertiary educational institution where English is a foreign language. The reflections are made on the basis of our experiences of teaching the course, the main challenge of which centres on students’ wronged perception of what poetry is; students tend to have an entrenched idea that poetry must be perplexing. The reflections have led us to a teaching strategy which we call “prosing poem.” Applying the strategy, we help students by providing made-up prosaic forms of the poems. This strategy has proven to help demystify students’ idea on poetry as a difficult subject. It allows students to unpack the poetic texts in a less daunting way as they can rely on their English mastery without having cognitive block. Keywords: poetry, EFL, prosing poem, teaching strategy DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.15639/teflinjournal.v33i1/201-219 Along with daily conversations, poetry might be the oldest form of verbal expression. This verbal form, ranging from holy to mundane expression, has always been with us accompanying our life history and also trajectory. Religious teachings, myths, legends, lullabies, are, as a matter of fact, originally in poetic forms. Popular songs, moreover, are evidently expressed this way. Despite its ubiquity, the teaching of poetry is not necessarily an easy undertaking, especially in the context of foreign language teaching. In this article, we are going to propose the initial step of the teaching of poetry, that is, literal comprehension of the work in the context of the teaching of English as a foreign language (TEFL) in Indonesia. This issue appears to be one of the perennial concerns of instructors of literary courses in the context of EFL in general and in particular in the Indonesian EFL context (e.g., Basthomi, 2001, 2003; Mulatsih, 2018; Novianti, 2016; Syamsia & Ismail, 2021; Zakiyah & Wahyuni, 2020). In