Creative writing for second language learners
With the support of EU funding, the project 'Creative writing as a tool in second language acquisition' (CW AND SLA) is advancing knowledge of effective second language acquisition (SLA) teaching. Team members wish to improve SLA teaching at Poland's Jagiellonian University and Tunisia's Institut Supérieur des Sciences Humaines de Tunis (ISSHT). This will enable curriculum reform in the ISSHT as Tunisia expands its SLA provision, and will allow for greater linguistics and literature integration into SLA education. Efforts are also aimed at establishing the groundwork for future SLA research by creating a corpus of comparable texts written by Polish learners, Tunisian learners and native speakers. The initiative will encourage future cooperation between partner countries and universities: a scheme facilitates visits by SLA experts from the Jagiellonian and creative writing teaching experts from Strathclyde University, Scotland to the ISSHT. They will pass along specific methods of teaching in creative writing, and promote cooperation between Polish and Tunisian linguists over standardised creative writing tasks to be included in an SLA corpus. Following this, ISSHT experts will visit the Jagiellonian and then Strathclyde to analyse data and share findings. CW AND SLA work will raise awareness of the methodology used for creative writing teaching at Strathclyde University. Staff from the Jagiellonian, Strathclyde and the ISSHT will collaborate on the design of a drama course that can be modelled in teaching to Tunisian students. This will then be replicated in teaching to students in Poland and the United Kingdom. Despite encountering some cultural difficulties in creating writing tasks for the students that could be executed comparably in all three countries, project members were able to generate texts in the three languages. Linguists at the Jagiellonian and the ISSHT successfully compiled a corpus from texts in all three languages and analysed them to identify learning errors in near-native English as a second or foreign language (ESL). These linguists analysed these errors and assessed to what extent they derive from cultural, native language or genre-based factors. Findings from ongoing CW AND SLA efforts will benefit ESL specialists in a range of languages, enabling them to experiment with creative writing as a teaching method. Teachers will also have at their disposal a corpus of texts to help them diagnose relevant problems.