The thesis responds to the question 'How do children respond to poetry they hear from recordings, and what are the implications for teaching?' It makes a case for the educational value of listening to poetry in primary and secondary classrooms, traCing the erratic treatment of heard poetry in the curriculum over the last century through to present frameworks. Through a method of Conversation Analysis, transcripts derived from audio-visual footage of classroom responses to heard poems are considered. These yield insights as to how pupils respond to poems they hear and how they share their responses in group discussion. On the basis of such analysis, the thesis argues that pupils respond to heard poems in ways not adequately acknowledged by pedagogy or in the curriculum. Important affective dimensions of response are revealed, as is the complexity of pupil response. The thesis suggests that responses to heard poems are oriented to some extent by the listener's gender in relation to the gender of the heard voice. The thesis argues that the findings have implications for pedagogy, the English curriculum, resourcing for teaching, the Citizenship curriculum and teacher education and professional development. Supplied by The British Library - 'The world's knowledge'