DEVELOPING CREATIVE ESL WRITING ACTIVITIES

Liudmyla Lysenko

(Kropyvnytskyi, Ukraine)

Developing creative writing is an important element in students overall learning experience. It is also a part of our professional development as educators and teachers. Creativity, be it in writing or in any other project, does not come from the void and we are not born creative minds. Writing is perhaps the most difficult and tedious areas of the communicative approach to teach. There are mechanisms for developing creativity and fostering imagination. Creative writing normally refers to the production of texts which have an aesthetic rather than a purely informative, instrumental or pragmatic purpose. Most often, such texts take the form of poems or stories, though they are not confined to these genres. (Letters, journal entries, blogs, essays, travelogues, etc. can also be more or less creative.) In fact, the line between creative writing (CW) and expository writing (ER) is not carved in stone. In general, however CW texts draw more heavily on intuition, close observation, imagination, and personal memories than ER texts. There are many reasons why a teacher might be hesitant to use technology in the classroom. For some of us, we grew up just as PCs were becoming a common fixture in homes, and so we cling to paper with a sense of nostalgia. Others, it is the fear of trying to manage a classroom of students online. Finally, in some cases, there are teachers who aren't fortunate enough to work in a district with 1:1 technology. In all these cases, as teachers, we have to overcome our fears and embrace the benefits of using technology to teach writing.

Student Writing with Technology

Although there are benefits to learning by writing on paper, there are as many to writing digitally. For example, most teachers have had students with learning disabilities in their class. Often for these students, just the act of trying to form words on paper or through typing can be such a challenge that they lose sight of the writing strategies you were trying to teach them. For these students, they can use any number of free apps that will allow them to speak their words, and have the computer type them on the screen in an online word processing program. There are numerous benefits of teaching writing using modern technologies. It would be much easier for students with learning disabilities to have access to assistive technology. And all the students will get an access to resources for ESOL students.

Another benefit of using technology to teach writing is that students can get immediate feedback in multiple ways. First, there are many free grammar checking applications and websites that students can easily use in order to help students proofread their work. There are websites or free extensions that work in the web browser as well. These tools are helpful for students who perhaps are reading at a lower grade level, who are learning English as a second language, or simply struggle to write using appropriate English.

Additionally, using technology offers all students access to other resources such as online dictionaries and thesauruses. They can also easily share documents with you, their teacher, to gain feedback at every stage of the writing process.

Using Writing Activities for Interactive Work in a Classroom

Writing Posts

Most of students should be familiar with Facebook and Instagram, so it can be a good starting point for an ESL writing exercise. Encourage students to write short posts on the given ESL writing topic. You can even create an Instagram account for your class where the learners can share their thoughts.

Writing Emails

Emails are the main source of communication between people around the world, and that’s why email writing is a key to effective communication. Explain to your students the main differences between formal and informal emails, outline the structure and vocabulary and encourage the students to write their own emails. They can write emails to each other based on a specified topic, such as organizing a surprise party for a friend’s birthday.

Writing Ads and TV Commercials

Advertisements and commercials are a great example of creative writing, so they can be used as writing activities for ESL students. Give your learners some sample ads as well as typical expressions that are used in advertising, and then ask the learners to create their own ads. You can bring some familiar objects to the classroom and tell the learners to advertise them. The students can work solo, in pairs, or in groups.

Error Correction

This ESOL writing exercise focuses on ability to detect and correct mistakes in an already written text. One of examples is to give the students a letter from an “imaginary friend” who does not speak English very well and has asked you to correct his or her letter. Each line of the letter should contain at least one mistake, which the students should identify and correct.

Collaborative ESL Writing Activity

Ask your students to write a story together. Each student should write a sentence and pass on the sheet to another student, who should continue the story. In the end, someone can read the story aloud. Such activity can both train the writing skills and spice up your ESL writing lessons, making them more fun and exciting.

Association game

Play an association game with your students: tell them a word and ask them to create an association chain for it, i.e. to name the association with each next word. For example, airport – travel – holidays – fun – party – night – moon – space, and so on. When the association chain is ready, ask the students to write a story by using all of these words.

Image-Based Story Writing

For this ESOL writing practice, you should mix up cards with various images in a bag or basket, and then ask each student to take three random images. Then the most interesting part starts: the students should write stories that involve each of the three depicted objects.

Shortening The Texts

Give your students a bulky text overloaded with long expressions and ask them to shorten the text and remove everything that seems odd, thus making the text clear and concise. You can shorten one of the texts together with the students and then have them work in groups or pairs.

To sum up, we conclude that, developing creative skills should be ignored in modern English classroom. Its benefits are myriad, its results often a pleasant surprise. Creative writing opens the door to exploring the world around students. Through creative we may find stronger English speakers, and Ukrainian students eager to challenge themselves and their role and place in society.

References:

1. Carter, R. (2004) Language and creativity: the art of common talk.  London: Routledge.

2. Cszikszentmihalyi, M. (1997) Creativity: Flow and the psychology of discovery and invention.  New York: Harper Perennial.

3.  Cook, G. (2000) Language Play: Language Learning. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

4. [electronic resource, access: http://blog.vipkid.com.cn/esl-writing-activities]