WEEK 3 Considerations in Designing Activities for Creative Writing
27 Jan 2025 - 31 Jan 2025
TSLB3563 Creative
writing
Creative writing exercises
• Purpose: to teach a technique.
• Highly specific, more specific than creative writing
prompts, and much more specific than story generators.
• Organizing ideas for creative writing is crucial.
Introduction
WHY?
1.Ensure that you know what you’re going to be writing about before
you begin writing. It’s easy to get lost amongst all your creative ideas
when producing a piece of creative writing.
2. Guide your writing in the direction you want it and will help to
ensure you’re not lost in the words or repeating yourself.
Introduction
There are certain considerations that should be taken into account
when designing activities for creative writing.
Example. Let’s choose one of
these
• Create a list of words related to something you love.
• Storyboarding a short film.
• Writing a family newsletter.
• Describe everything you’re sensing right now, using all five senses.
• Write a list of animals A to Z with a one-sentence description of
each one. Feel free to include imaginary animals.
• Write a very short story about three siblings fighting over a toy.
Now rewrite it twice, each time from a different character’s
perspective.
Considerations in Designing Activities
What other considerations
Cognitive Process Theory of Reader Response in teaching creative writing
Writing (Flower & Hayes, Theory (Rosenblatt, for young learners that you
1981) 1985) know?
Cognitive Process Theory of Writing (Flower &
Hayes, 1981)
• State & develop
• Explore & consolidate
• Write and regenerate
Article:
Linda Flower and Social Cognition: - Constructing A View of the Writing Process
Structure of the writing model. Redrawn from Flower and Hayes, (1981)
Cognitive Process Theory of Writing (Flower &
Hayes, 1981)
State & develop
• Conventional idea of planning a piece of writing, stating a high-level goal then fleshing this out with
sub-goals, perhaps in the form of a flow chart or a concept diagram.
• Moving from high-level goals and moving toward sub-goals to accomplish high-level goals.
• Goal-setting: procedural and substantive – created by writer.
• The authors describe two kinds of goals, process goals (“how to carry out the process of writing”) and
content goals (“all things the writer wants to say or do to an audience”).
Cognitive Process Theory of Writing (Flower &
Hayes, 1981)
State & develop
• Planning: writers form an internal representation of the knowledge that will be used in writing – then
they build it
• Generating ideas: retrieving relevant information from long-term memory
• Organizing: helps writer give a meaningful structure to ideas
• Goal-setting: procedural and substantive – created by the writer.
• Translating: putting ideas into visible language.
• Reviewing: evaluating and revising – usually lead to new cycles of planning/translating
• The Monitor: writing strategist that decides when the writer moves from one process to the next
Cognitive Process Theory of Writing (Flower &
Hayes, 1981)
Explore & Consolidate
• Explore new ideas, then return to higher-level goals to reconsider and make new goals – poor writers
can only explore.
• Long-term memory: a “storehouse of knowledge about the topic and audience as well as knowledge of
writing plans and problem representations” (371). This “relatively stable entity” can be accessed
through cues to “retrieve a network of useful knowledge” (371). The first issue, then, is to find the cues.
And second, “reorganizing and adapting this knowledge for the demands of the rhetorical problem”
(371).
Cognitive Process Theory of Writing (Flower &
Hayes, 1981)
Explore & Consolidate
• Explore new ideas, then return to higher-level goals to reconsider and make new goals – poor writers
can only explore.
• Long-Term Memory: is a “storehouse of knowledge about the topic and audience as well as knowledge
of writing plans and problem representations” (371). This “relatively stable entity” can be accessed
through cues to “retrieve a network of useful knowledge” (371). The first issue, then, is to find the cues.
And second, “reorganizing and adapting this knowledge for the demands of the rhetorical problem”
(371).
Cognitive Process Theory of Writing (Flower &
Hayes, 1981)
Write & Regenerate
• Similar to explore and consolidate except that the writer uses something that he or she has actually
written to test out ideas and ways of expressing them.
• In reviewing composed text, writers can sometimes generate new goals as well as improving the
expression of their ideas.
• “Revision” is not seen as a separate, unique stage at the end of the composing process; rather, it “can
occur at any time a writer chooses to evaluate or revise his text or plans. As an important part of
writing, it constantly leads to new planning or ‘re-vision’ of what one wanted to say” (376).
Cognitive Process Theory of Writing (Flower &
Hayes, 1981)
This theory comprises of four key points:
• The writing process involves a "set of distinctive thinking processes" that writers
employ during the composing process;
• writers organize these thinking processes hierarchically and often embed them within
each other;
• composing is "a goal-directed thinking process" that is guided by the writer's own
"growing network" of goals; and
• writers generate purposeful goals, both high-level goals and supporting sub-goals, and
may revise them or even formulate new ones based on what they learn during the act
of writing.
Scan the QR Code. Read the summary of Hills Like White Elephants. Analyse
if the characters treat each other in a good or bad way. Share in class.
Why is it important?
• Forces the reader to look past the text and look for deeper meaning.
• Focuses on the importance of the reader and their individual response to the text.
• Allows a reader to take own personal perspectives into account when analysing a
literary text
• Reader’s interaction with the text gives the text its meaning – the text cannot exist
without the reader
• Helps the reader to become a better critical thinker and reader
Salient Features
• Acknowledge importance of text and reader.
• Text relationship with reader.
• Reader is 3rd party.
• Reality exist in readers’ minds.
• Work is fully created when readers assimilate it.
• Text does not consist of one inherent meaning but it depends on individual
interpretation.
Considerations in teaching Creative Writing
for Young Learners
Readiness Approriacy
• Cognitive Ability • Topic Selection
• Schemata • Language Use
• Language Competency
Cognitive Ability
• Writing is not just a learning process, but a cognitive one as well.
• The cognition of creative writing is a much larger process than merely the use of
language.
• It encapsulates the brainstorming of ideas, the drawing upon of real world
experiences for inspiration, and the formulating of a story out of these experiences
and one’s own ideas.
• Cognition, and the cognitive processes which allow for and produce creativity, is
much broader than any one skill such as language.
• Rather, it is an integration of all of a person’s sensory systems
Schemata
• As mentioned in Carrell and Eistlerhold’s (1983) work, formal schemata, one of the
two types of schemata: formal schema and content schema, were described as
rhetorical and organizational patterns of text.
• The concept of formal schemata is defined as: "background knowledge of the
rhetorical structures of different types of texts”.
• These can include morphemic, lexical, and syntactic knowledge of the language.
Language Competency
• Teachers can give a choice to the students so that they can choose their own
topic.
• Before setting the task for elementary level students, according to Jeremy Harmer
(1998), teachers should make sure that students have enough language
competency to complete the task.
• At the same time teachers should be alert while checking the task.
• If teachers do excessive correction in elementary level it may have a negative
impact.
Topic Selection
• A quick way to conjure up story ideas or topic selection for young primary school
learners is through pictures.
• Use prompts such as "this image of two boys sitting on the wing of an aeroplane"
or "this one of a dinosaur in the garden", which can work really well.
• Another tip is to ask students to start several stories or topics, then choose the
one they want to finish.
• This writing checklist will help students evaluate their work when it’s finished.
Language Use
• Creative writing is aesthetically motivating.
• It deals less in facts than in the imaginative representation of emotions, events,
characters, and experience.
• Creative writing is a personal activity, involving feeling.
• An important quality of creative writing, however, is the way it can evoke sensations.
• And, unlike expository writing, it can be read on many different levels and is open to
multiple interpretations.
• Creative writing aids language development at all levels, which includes grammar,
vocabulary, phonology, and discourse.
• Language used must be at the appropriate level.
Topic Selection
• A quick way to conjure up story ideas or topic selection for young primary school
learners is through pictures.
• Use prompts such as "this image of two boys sitting on the wing of an aeroplane"
or "this one of a dinosaur in the garden", which can work really well.
• Another tip is to ask students to start several stories or topics, then choose the
one they want to finish.
• This writing checklist will help students evaluate their work when it’s finished.
TUTORIAL
TASK
E-LEARNING TASK
Amirah Akhyar
IPGKBA
Thank
you!
