Teaching, Learning and Researching in an ESL Context

English Teaching & Learning, 2017

Previous research on learning and teaching creative writing in English as a second or foreign language contexts has focused on courses or workshops devoted to writing of poetry or stories, very few studies have addressed how creative writing may be used in an EFL writing course to enrich students’ learning and writing experience. Using in-depth interviewing as the main research tool, this paper investigates eight Taiwanese undergraduate students’ experience of creative writing as an autonomous, free-choice writing assignment. Findings suggested that students conceptualized creative writing as free and unstructured, stimulating thinking and offering an opportunity for their imagination to run wild. In the one-year exploration of creative writing, students gradually developed their own approaches and exhibited different writing orientations, some drawing mainly from daily life experience and some leaning towards imagination. Overall, students’ writing motivation, learner autonomy, and audience awareness were enhanced, which may be attributed to peer response groups and minimal teacher intervention in students’ writing process. Implications of these findings for researchers and educators are discussed.

This article documents an English as a foreign language (EFL) classroom writing activity to promote students’ creativity. This classroom writing activity had two main objectives: to provide students with writing exercises that would promote practical use of written English language as a means of communication, and to facilitate students’ creativity in engaging with and solving problems in their social community. A real-world pedagogic writing task was developed to achieve these two objectives. The activity was carried out in a junior secondary school extracurricular program with 16 students from Years 7 and 8. Students’ perceptions of the writing activity were positive, and more importantly, their awareness of social issues in the community improved as students became engaged in meaningful communicative situations in their real social environment.

Languages

Task complexity has long been posited as an influential task feature inspiring much research. However, task complexity frameworks might be in need of adjustment, as they tend to emphasize the role of cognitive factors and neglect affective ones despite the fact that learner agency and potential for creativity have been linked to certain aspects of task performance, possibly exerting their influence through learners’ affects. Thus, to investigate the role of agency and creativity in task-based L2 writing, this study aimed to explore the relationship between task conditions conceptualized as the levels of learner agency and the potential for creativity in Chinese students’ English written performances on the one hand, and the possible role that the study contexts might play in the written performances in each task condition on the other. Participants of the study were two groups of Chinese intermediate learners of English studying in Hungary and China (n = 40), producing 120 narrative...

Japanese high school students rarely have the opportunity to express themselves through creative writing in their native language. There are even fewer opportunities for them to write creatively in English, and opportunities to engage in writing English poetry are almost unheard of. This paper discusses the results of a creative writing lesson that employed short poetry and prose writing tasks. The class consisted of 19 high English ability, 3rd-year students in an all-girls private high school and focused on facilitating individual expression. Data collected from pre- and post-lesson questionnaires suggest that second language learners can benefit from creative writing activities. Results from this lesson may provide impetus for language educators to consider incorporating creativity into their classrooms.

CENTRAL ASIAN JOURNAL OF SOCIAL SCIENCES AND HISTORY, 2022

In this article we focus on free creative writing activities with the control of the teacher. Because, writing is essentially a creative process. Learning how to write in English is impor¬tant. Creative writing gives learners practice in composing and complements more tra¬ditional approaches. This article de-scribes activities that focus on communi¬cation and self-expression. Learners will be encouraged to write if writing tasks motivate them and keep them interested.

DergiPark (Istanbul University), 2022

This research offers the scenario of developing creative writing skills in a real EFL context. As creative writing is one of the important skills to be developed in students, this research aims to intervene action plans in the EFL class to develop students' creative writing skills. Action research was used as a method for the research and the research has been guided by action learning theory.With the help of different activities developed as an action plan, students were involved in writing tasks and the data were collected from the observations. Students' behavior was studied while they were involved in creative writing activities. Findings give the rendering of the effectiveness of using creative writing skills in EFL class. The use of different activities and their details are the portrayals of the classroom realm which demonstrates the possibility of creative writing as a powerful tool to develop the writing skills of students.

International Perspectives on Creative Writing in Second Language Education, 2022

This chapter reports a nine-week English as a foreign language screenwriting course that was conducted with 19 English-major students in a state university in China. This qualitative classroom research deploys the theoretical framework of creative stylistics to explore how a second language screenwriting course can feasibly integrate instruction on language forms with guidance on aesthetic writing and the promotion of creative thinking. In particular, the design of the course builds on stylistics and Second Language Acquisition pedagogy’s shared interest in the function of language in context. The primary data that this study focuses on are the weekly English screenwriting submitted by the Chinese students. Through selected excerpts of three focal participants’ English screenwriting, this chapter illustrates the following major themes identified through qualitative coding. Firstly, students’ social knowledge served as a resource for creative thinking and context-sensitive interpretation of language forms. Secondly, effective phrasing was facilitated by students’ creative deployment of their multicultural literary repertoire. Thirdly, the crafting of subtexts was in close relation with one’s metalinguistic awareness. The findings hold pedagogical implications not only for an English language classroom but also for an English for Academic Purposes classroom where L2 screenwriting may be used as a learning tool.

This qualitative L2 writing study presents a contextualised response to the movement of Creative Writing Across the Curriculum. A story-writing assignment is implemented in an introductory Linguistics module as an alternative medium for knowledge-construction. The task offered the Chinese students the opportunity to utilise some recently acquired semantics knowledge for purposeful and idiosyncratic construction of a short story in English. 110 stories were collected and examined using a sociocognitive view of “writer voices”, seeing voices as arising from the negotiation between the writer and various forms of knowledge in the context, such as the target subject knowledge and the convention of narratives. In order to look for creative modes of knowledge application and examine how the student writers’ applications of the target semantics invoke or deviate from established and culturally-rooted cognitive structures (i.e. “schema”) the stories were initially examined by corpus linguistics techniques and then manual and hermeneutic coding. Three general tendencies stand out: the stories show 1) strategic, 2) conventional and 3) creative applications of the target semantics knowledge. Subsequently, focal students were interviewed individually. Six focal cases are included here, illustrating characteristic negotiations between the writer and certain symbolic resources. Overall, the study holds implication for how EFL creative writing assignments might help stimulating Chinese students’ knowledge-making potential in a subject context.

Studies in Literature …, 2010

The notions of success in learning writing in English is associated with self-expressions, the flow of ideas, outsider expectations, growing confidence and enjoyment of L2 academic writing. The most common problem that confronts teachers of a writing class does not lie so much on what to ask the students to write about; the difficulty is more on motivating the students to write interesting and effective materials or in other words, creative pieces of essays. What constitutes and contributes to language creativity in writing? This paper discusses the results of a quasi-experiment in which a literature -based language instruction was incorporated in an ESL writing class to evaluate the language creativity of students' essays. Descriptive and inferential statistics show that a literature based language instruction can help students develop creativity in classroom writing.

2019

This research project aims at investigating students’ and teachers’ EFL creative writing practices in Indonesia. This qualitative case study, situated in two universities, involved 11 university students and four teachers. The methods of data collection were interviews, observations, and documents (journals and samples of students’ writings). Amabile’s theory of creativity, Dewantara’s 3N learning principles, and Kaufman and Beghetto’s Four-C developmental trajectory theory were synthesised as the theoretical framework. Some key findings are: ‘novelty’ and ‘originality’ were culturally interpreted; being ‘observant’ emerged as an important attribute; synthesising and using bilingual ability were significant capacities employed in the process; and a few misalignments existed between views and practices.