Creative Writing as Part and Parcel of Developing Communicative - Intellectual FL Learners’ Powers

Victoria V. Safonova
Additional contact information
Victoria V. Safonova: Doctor of Pedagogical Sciences, professor at the Department of Foreign Languages and Area Studies, Lomonosov Moscow State University, Moscow, Russian Federation

European Journal of Social Sciences Education and Research Articles, 2020, vol. 7

Abstract: For many years in ELT methodology the questions of teaching writing in ELT coursebooks have been given much attention in terms of its nature, differences between written and spoken speech, ELT objectives and approaches to teaching writing, types of writing genres, writing assessment. But one rather neglected area in that regard is a graded teaching of creative writing to FL learners. The fifteen-year experience with organizing language-and-culture competitions launched by the Research Centre “Euroschool†for foreign language /FL/ students across Russia have proved that even intermediate FL learners, not to speak about advanced students are quite capable of writing in a FL: a) poems and songs expressing their ideas about teenagers’ lifestyle - visions of contemporary world; b) short stories describing family and school life experiences of their own or their peers; c) essays based on their comparative study of native and foreign cultures; d) presentations of Russian culture - other cultures of the Russian Federation in an English environment while being on exchange visits; e) translations of English poetry, short stories, excerpts from humours books, stripes of comics. The paper compares teaching creative writing in Russian and English, discusses the questions arisen from the outcomes of the language-and-culture competitions, arguing that effective teaching of creative writing presupposes: 1) teaching a FL in the context of the dialogue of cultures and civilizations, 2) introducing creative writing into a FL curriculum, 3) designing a package of thought-provoking teaching materials aiming at developing communicative, intellectual - mediating learners’ powers, 4) applying appropriate assessment scales for observing the dynamics of learners’ development as creative writers, 5) marrying students’ bilingual and cross-cultural/pluricultural classroom activities stimulating their participation in language-and-culture competitions.

Keywords: teaching creative writing; FLT; FLL; language-and culture competitions; FLT hierarchy of creative writing types; monolingual and bilingual creative writing; cross-cultural creative tasks (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://brucol.be/index.php/ejser/article/view/6631 (text/html)
https://brucol.be/files/articles/ejser_v7_i2_20/Safonova.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eur:ejserj:182

DOI: 10.26417/ejser.v12i1.p138-149

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in European Journal of Social Sciences Education and Research Articles from Revistia Research and Publishing
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Revistia Research and Publishing (office@revistia.com).