Teaching Creative Writing to Second Language Learners

A Guidebook

Ryan Thorpe

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000467406
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This timely and accessible book offers engaging guidance to teachers of second language students on teaching creative writing in their classrooms. Creative writing is a tool that can inspire second language learners to write more, play with language, and enjoy and improve not only their writing, but also their speaking, listening, and reading skills. Addressing the expectations and perceptions of writing in another language, Thorpe demonstrates how to foster successful creative writing environments and teach and assess creative writing in a way that is tailored to the distinct needs of non-native speakers. Covering key topics such as cultural storytelling, voice, genre, and digital composition, assessment, and more, Thorpe shares successful creative writing instructional practices informed by current research in creative writing and second language education. Each chapter includes insights, advice, and student examples that can help new teachers take their first steps in more reflective second language creative writing classroom.

An invaluable resource for instructors of non-native students and an ideal text for pre-service teachers in courses in TESOL, writing instruction, and applied linguistics, this book invites you to use creative writing not only as a successful method for teaching L2 writing, but also as a way to improve student motivation and output, for more effective language learning.

Chapter 1Introduction to Creative Writing in ESL

DOI: 10.4324/9781003043492-1

When I think of my language learning, I think of stories. I think of how, as a teenager in Texas, I wrote children’s stories in Spanish during my high school years and read them to a class of Spanish-speaking children. My Spanish story focused on a young boy who fell into a children’s literature book, and he ran between stories, searching for his way out. I made up minor stories the boy found himself lost in: ducks loving mountains and mice befriending dishes. When he found the dragon on the last page, he rode it out of the book and back home. The students thought my book was crazy, but they laughed (sometimes at the story and sometimes at my Spanish) and thanked me. I remember that story because I spent hours writing it, regularly finding my vocabulary lacking and asking friends far better at Spanish how to say certain phrases, but as my character entered new stories in my book, I entered new realms of vocabulary and grammar.

Later in university, I took Spanish III, and my professor assigned small writing prompts for each Friday requiring targeted structures much in the way Jane Spiro (2004) does for poetry. I still remember the essay I wrote using the conditional tense. I had to use the conditional tense to write a story about what I would do if I had a time machine. My plan was to go back in time and invent Mickey Mouse before Disney, and while that is an interesting idea on the surface, I failed to consider the details like funding, marketing, and any business sense.

After years of living in China, I took Chinese classes, and I wrote tiny stories in Chinese to develop fluency. My Chinese teacher placed no restrictions on me. Instead, she was happy with my attempts regardless of how simple they were. When I wrote a story about getting lost in a museum for so long that I lived there, she loved it, grammar mistakes and all. The next week, she told me to write two more.

I am not alone in finding that my memories of language learning contain the stories I wrote while studying that language. When David Sedaris (2010) was learning French, he also told brief stories in his essay “Me Talk Pretty One Day.” While his teacher was assigning simple, complete the sentence exercises, he pushed himself to develop increasingly complicated responses. Instead of an easier answer to complete the question, he would come up with something far more creative, like “A quick run around the lake? I’d love to! Just give me a moment while I strap on my wooden leg.” Despite not even being given a chance to tell a story, he created one from a simple classroom activity.

The place of creative writing in English language teaching has fluctuated over the years, but recently, more scholars have been giving it attention. Led by Alan Maley, his work on the relationship between creative writing and language learning has created specific activities, anthologies, and scholarly work focused on this topic. Working for the British Council, Nik Peachey and Alan Maley (2015) edited Creativity in the English Classroom, an entire book dedicated to creativity’s role in the classroom with several articles speaking directly to the use of creative writing in language learning. This collection is only the tip of the iceberg, though, with scholars around the world taking an interest in the potential for creative writing to help aid students’ writing development. Despite this surge of scholarship, Iain Maloney (2019) points out that “[creative writing] may be the most under-used tool in the [English Language Teaching] box.”

Understanding the place of creative writing in the world of TESOL is not the central focus of this book, but second language creative writing research often withers when compared to the mountain of research focusing on academic writing in a second language. There is some hesitation toward the field of creative writing. Monteith (1992) believes the creative part of creative writing might be the problem, because creative is not always a positive word. When thinking of phrases like “creative accounting,” the creative note feels pejorative rather than encouraging. At this time then, a working definition of creative writing is needed, though, and Ramet (2010) does an excellent job of defining creative writing by noting that it is “having the power to create an imaginative, original literary production or composition.” This definition focuses on more traditional forms of creative writing such as stories, poems, plays, and memoirs, and these genres come with some hesitation on the part of students.

This hesitation toward creative writing is more complicated than just a simple naming issue though. Students and teachers have assumptions and preconceived ideas about creative writing (see Chapter 2) that play a role in causing them to waver about engaging in creative writing. In addition, their first-language understanding (or lack of familiarity) with creative writing (see Chapter 6) can serve as interference and make them vacillate on its benefits. Creative writing’s greatest strength, though, is also its greatest weakness: students see it as an extension of themselves far more than academic writing and often feel frustrated with the imperfect nature of the final product. Liao (2012) concludes that students often see it as being too difficult, because in addition to writing in another language, they also feel the burden of quality self-expression.

The current setup of creative writing in most students’ educations also makes creative writing difficult for them. Creative writing’s place in the curriculum and how instructors teach creative writing make it feel out of reach for many learners. Instructors and programs often restrict access to creative writing classes only for advanced learners (Schrader, 2000), so students rarely receive the opportunity to write creatively until far later in their learning experiences. Their frustration with the final products of their writing is also connected with their and their teachers’ beliefs in what good writing is. Students often learn in an ESL academic writing environment where curriculum focuses on error correction (Homstad & Thorson, 2000). When errors are interpreted as a sign of bad writing, the inevitable mistakes that come from trying a new form of writing cause students to think they are unsuccessful. Finally, instructors are often victims of how second language writing courses are often designed. As Iida (2013) has pointed out, writing courses often focus on practical skills and the reproduction of first language texts, and if this is the only focus of a second language writing class, then teachers and their students will feel confused when entering a second language creative writing class where play and experimentation are the primary pedagogy tools.

Additionally, the role of creative writing in the classroom rarely helps students take creative writing seriously. Often it is an activity done on the side or early in a unit, an appetizer or side to an eventual entree of more substantive learning. James Britton et al. (1975) demonstrated how rarely high school and university professors were willing to use what he deemed to be “poetic” activities in their classrooms, focusing instead on more lecture-based activities. Professors spoke, and students wrote notes in response. From my own experience, I see instructors often using creative writing in a low-stakes way, allowing students to enjoy the fun of creative writing before focusing on more difficult subjects. While creative writing can serve as a warm-up or homework assignment, it has the potential to do far more, and I hope to show that potential in this book.

Besides writing about the theory of creative writing, Maley (2012) has been taking practical steps as well by founding the Asia Teacher-Writers Project. This organization seeks to see non-native English teachers as potential sources of literary materials for both themselves and for their students because of the cultural similarities that they share. This is important because researchers (Babaee, 2015) have noted that many global textbook readers lack specific texts for specific markets, and non-native English writers can help bridge this gap. Besides working to develop instructors’ writing abilities, they host a yearly conference, have both scholarly and creative publications, and develop anthologies and readers for students. Groups like these are essential in raising the confidence of non-native teachers to take part in a global discussion of second language creative writing.

Another important development in the last few years is a change in the rhetorical stance of second language creative writing scholars themselves. When looking at slightly older publications (Hanauer, 2010; Urlaub, 2011; Disney, 2014) about second language creative writing, many writers feel the need to not only introduce the idea of second language creative writing, but also argue for the importance and capabilities of second language creative writing in their texts. More recent texts (Hauer & Hanauer, 2017; Kim, 2018), though, take these facts for granted. As scholars around the world during the last few years have written about creative writing learning in a second language context, more and more scholars skip directly to their arguments because the value of creative writing is becoming increasingly accepted, and over time, assumed as a given.

Second language creative writing might be currently underutilized in many classrooms, but that status is slowly changing. As Clarence Ray Bussinger (2013) pointed out, “More and more ELT educators are calling for an increased use of [creative writing] in [English learning teaching].” This development stems from the realization that anyone can take part in this growing field at all levels of language abilities because as Maloney (2019) has pointed out:

Teaching and studying creative writing requires no special talents, no elite gift given to a lucky few. Anyone who can learn to write, can learn to write creatively. Anyone who can teach writing, can teach creative writing. All that remains is the will to do so.

If teachers want to grow the field of second language creative writing, though, we must start by understanding the current shortcomings in the field and consider how to overcome them.

The Current State of Pedagogy

As someone who spent most of his undergraduate, masters, and PhD studies in creative writing classes, I am always amazed when I think back on my experiences and remember mostly workshops. Even as an undergraduate, I got into an introduction to fiction class and after a few short weeks we were already workshopping each other’s pieces, and for the longest time, I thought workshop was the primary activity of a creative writing class. We workshopped our pieces, got feedback, revised, and then tried again. Only later in my career did I consider how troubled the workshop approach was. For those unfamiliar with this approach, Tom Kealey (2005) describes it as an “editorial meeting about the student work. A professor and the other students discuss a writer’s work—its strengths and weaknesses—and offer suggestions for improvement. Meanwhile, the writer sits and listens and takes notes.” This format has a few variations, but the basic spirit of it remains the same.

Workshop dominates creative writing pedagogy, and even in much second language creative writing, the workshop model is utilized. It is so common of an approach to creative writing that Dianne Donnelly (2010) notes that “when one speaks of the pedagogy of creative writing, the workshop is implied in the address.” This trend does not only occur in theory. Patrick Bizzaro (2004) surveyed creative writing classes to discover that 51% of creative writing classes use the basic workshop, with 39% having some variation of the workshop. As a result, only 10% of those surveyed thought of themselves as doing something other than teaching with the workshop.

This focus on the workshop has serious potential repercussions for the second language creative writing classroom. The goals of a first language creative writing class and those of a second language creative writing class have to be different in both theory and practice. Even more so when the founding goal of the workshop is taken into consideration. Mary Swander (2005) writes that “Paul Engle developed the workshop as a place where young, polished writers would come for a year or two and have their work critiqued. Engle assumed his graduate students already knew how to write.” This assumption of already knowing how to write creatively is a real trouble for...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• About the Author
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Introduction to Creative Writing in ESL
• 2. Expectations and Perceptions
• 3. Research in Creative Writing
• 4. The Workshop and Other Options
• 5. Using Literature
• 6. Intercultural Storytelling
• 7. Brainstorming
• 8. Characters
• 9. Conflict
• 10. Setting
• 11. Dialogue
• 12. Word Choice
• 13. Endings
• 14. Developing Voice
• 15. Working with Genre
• 16. Digital Composition
• 17. Responding to Creative Writing
• 18. Editing
• 19. Grading Creative Writing
• 20. Final Thoughts
• Index