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Creative writing for language learners (and teachers) | TeachingEnglish | British Council | BBC

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Dear bloggers,

I felt I should add some more information about a small Creative Writing project which my Malaysian colleague, Dr Jayakaran Mukundan, and I have been involved in for the past 7 years. If nothing else, this shows how something practical can be achieved in the area of CW. The ‘Asia Teacher-Writers Project’ is, we believe, interesting for a number of reasons. It is a grassroots / bottom-up initiative. Participation is entirely voluntary and the project is independent of institutions. It is also predicated on the principle of ‘small is beautiful’ (Schumacher 1974). There is no ambition to effect sweeping, large-scale changes, such as the many failed government initiatives which litter the educational landscape. It has a local focus with no global ambitions. It works, if it works at all, through persuasion at the personal level, and through the commitment of a small number of individuals. Small phenomena can nonetheless have large effects, as Chaos Theory teaches us. (Gleick 1988)

However, it is also significant because it intersects in important ways with some currents of contemporary professional concern. The role of the NNS continues to preoccupy scholars of the spread of English, as does the development of English as an International Language, no longer the sole property of the metropolitan countries ( Rubdy and Saraceni 2006). This project is intimately linked with such concerns. It promotes the notion of NNS teachers able to find their own place and their own idiom in this rapidly-changing global movement. The project also reasserts the importance of the place of affect (Arnold 1999), of visualisation (Tomlinson 1998, 2001) , noticing (Schmidt 1990), personalisation, Multiple Intelligences (Gardner 1985), motivation (Dornyei 2001), authenticity, extensive reading (Day and Bamford 1998), the teaching of expository writing in a second language, and creativity in general (Boden 1998, Carter 2004)

The project started in 2003 with a small workshop in Bangkok. Teacher/writers from a number of Asian countries gathered to discuss the desirability of writing creative materials in English for students in their countries. A collection of papers was the outcome (Tan 2004), together with some stories which were also eventually published by Pearson Malaysia (Maley and Mukundan 2005).

This first event was followed by workshops for roughly the same (but ever expanding pool) group in Melaka (2004), Fuzhou (2005) and Hanoi (2006), Salatiga (2007), Kathmandu (2008), Ho Chi Minh City (2009) and Jakarta (2009). Each workshop produced poems and stories which were published by Pearson Malaysia (Maley (ed) 2005, 2006, 2008), as well as another volume of papers (Mukundan 2006)

As already noted above, the group is noteworthy for being independent of any institutional support, and is entirely voluntary. Financial sponsorship was obtained from Assumption University, Bangkok in 2003, from Pearson Malaysia in 2004, from UBCHEA and Hwa Nan Womens’ College Fuzhou in 2005, from The Open University Hanoi in 2006, from local sponsors in Salatiga and Kathmandu, from icon razz Creative writing for language learners (and teachers) | TeachingEnglish | British Council | BBC earson and the Open University in Ho Chi Minh City, and from SEAMEO in Jakarta.. Each year, a volunteer takes on the responsibility for organising the workshop in a different venue in Asia. Plans are already afoot for another workshop, in Nepal in 2010.

The rationale and objectives of the group can be summarized as follows. The group operates in the belief that NNS teachers are not only capable of but are also uniquely well-placed to write literary materials for use by their own and other students in the Asia region. By virtue of the fact that they share their students’ background and contexts, they have an intuitive understanding of what will be culturally and topically relevant and attractive for them. What they all too often lack is the confidence in their own ability to write interesting material. The group operates to dispel this misconception.

The following rationale underpins the activities of the group:

The objectives are:

The intended outcomes are:

In other words, the project aims at three main audiences:

~ a small group of writers who produce the materials, and in so doing develop

professionally and personally. (The group hovers around the 30 mark at present, which is ample.)

~ English teachers in the region at large who will use the materials and hopefully go on

to develop their own in due course.

~ students of English in the region who will use the materials, and will themselves

produce texts which can be fed back as input to other students.

So what, then, actually happens during the workshops? The procedure which has evolved organically is as follows:

~ a few months before the workshop, participants are asked to submit a draft of one or more short stories and poems, and to prepare at least one teaching activity involving creative writing. These are submitted to the organising group.

~ at the workshop, participants peer-edit these texts. They are then passed to the editor before being forwarded to the publisher.

~ there are also input sessions when new ideas for activities are shared. There are now a number of published sources for such ideas (Koch 1990 , Matthews 1994, Rinvolucri and Frank 2007, Spiro 2004, 2007). These ideas are then refined and collated for diffusion via the website. Two handbooks of resources, for writing stories, and writing poems, are also in preparation.

~ one day is set aside for a writing field-trip to an atmospheric place. This may be a scenic beauty-spot, a place of pilgrimage, or an outstandingly interesting site. Participants write all day long, recording through poems their observations, sensations and reflections. These are then also passed to the editor.

~ it is customary for participants to present a workshop or paper at the conference held for local teachers, either just before or just after the main workshop.

The group remains small (which is one of its declared intentions). One of the strengths of the group is the close bonding which can happen only in a relatively small community. Contributors have come from some 10 Asian countries to date.

The following are the tangible outcomes so far:

We would certainly not claim, as Candide might have done, that we are living in the best of all possible worlds. The project is a modest one, and even its modest aims are not always fulfilled. Problems are of three main kinds:

1. Funding.

We have so far been fortunate in finding generous sponsors willing to underwrite a large portion of the costs. These include accommodation, workshop space and equipment, and administration. However, participants themselves have had to make very real sacrifices to attend the workshops, for example by paying their own airfares. The continuing success of the workshops depends on finding sponsorship, which makes the whole project somewhat precarious.

2. Outreach.

Although some interesting materials have been produced, they are not sufficiently well-known, even in the region. The publisher can do only so much to ensure that the materials come into the hands of those for whom they were intended. So far, the group has not been especially successful in popularising and publicising the materials, and this is a weakness. The possibility of setting up local groups of creative writer/teachers are being explored (in Malaysia in particular). This is a welcome initiative but others need to be taken to involve larger numbers of teachers in the CW movement.

3. Quality.

This is a sensitive issue. Writers are almost always in love with what they have written, and tend to resent it if their materials are radically edited or even excluded from publication. Fortunately, the group members have been mature enough to consent to their work being subjected to critical scrutiny. Even so, it has to be admitted that not all the work we publish is of the highest standard. The project is in the nature of an experiment, so that we sometimes need to leave some latitude for work which is interesting but not always as polished as we might wish. Long-term this is a problem we shall have to address however.

The project I have been describing here is small-scale, modest in its aims, and relatively insignificant. Its importance resides in the high degree of commitment by young, energetic professionals to its aims. Ultimately, change in our teaching practices will not come from top-down ministerial decrees, or from academic articles castigating the iniquities visited upon the NNS teacher, but from the commitment of individuals with a belief in the practical value of their actions. A journey of 1000 li begins with the first step.

References

Arnold, Jane. 1999. Affect in Language Learning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Boden, Margaret. 1998. The Creative Mind. London: Abacus.

Carter, Ronald. 2004. Language and Creativity: the art of common talk. London: Routledge.

Cook, Guy. 2000. Language Play: Language Learning. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Day, Richard and Julian Bamford. 1998. Extensive reading in the Second Language Classroom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Dornyei ,Zoltan 2001. Motivational Strategies in the Language Classroom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Gardner, Howard. 1985. Frames of Mind. London: Paladin Books

Gleick, James. 1988. Chaos. London:Sphere Books

Koch, Kenneth. 1990. Rose, where did you get that red? New York: Vintage Books.

Krashen, Stephen 2004 second edition. The Power of Reading. Portsmouth NH: Heinemann

Maley, Alan (ed) 2006 Asian Short Stories for Young Readers. Vol. 4. Petaling Jaya: Pearson/Longman Malaysia

Maley, Alan (ed) 2006 Asian Poems for Young Readers. Vol.5. Petaling Jaya:Pearson/Longman Malaysia.

Maley, Alan and Jayakaran Mukundan. (eds) 2005 Asian Stories for Young Readers, Vols 1 and 2. Petaling Jaya: Pearson/Longman Malaysia.

Maley, Alan and Jayakaran Mukundan (eds) 2005 Asian Poems for Young Readers.Vol. 3. Petaling Jaya: Pearson/Longman

Matthews, Paul. 1994. Sing Me the Creation. Stroud:Hawthorn Press.

Matthews, Paul. 2007. Words in Place. Stroud: Hawthorne Press.

Mukundan, Jayakaran. (ed) 2006 Creative Writing in EFL/ESL Classrooms II. Petaling Jaya: Pearson Longman Malaysia

Rubdy, Rani and Mario Saraceni (eds) 2006. English in the World: Global Rules, Global Roles. London/New York: Continuum.

Schmidt, Richard 1990. The Role of Consciousness in Second Language Learning. Applied Linguistics. Vol. 11, No. 2 129-158. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Schumacher, E.F. 1974. Small is Beautiful. London: Abacus/Sphere Books

Spiro, Jane 2004. Creative Poetry Writing. Oxford: Oxford university Press.

Spiro, Jane. 2007. Creative Story-building. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Tan, Bee Tin (ed) 2004. Creative writing in EFL/ESL Classrooms I. Serdang: UPM Press.

Tomlinson, Brian 1998. Seeing what they mean: helping L2 learners to visualise. In B.Tomlinson (ed). Materials Development in Language Teaching. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 265-78

Tomlinson, Brian (2001) The inner voice: a critical factor in language learning. Journal of the Imagination in L2 learning. VI, 123-154.


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