The creative writing workshop is a useful tool to improve the reading and writing skills of Spanish students, stimulate their imagination and encourage their judgmental attitude. This is the proposal of linguists Alberto de Lucas, from the Institute for Culture and Society (ICS) of the University of Navarra, and Rubén Pujante, of the University of Murcia and the University of Rennes 2, in a scientific article published in the journal MarcoELE, in a monographic volume dedicated to Current Trends in ELE research .

"Among the classical skills that are always contemplated in the teaching of languages, oral has gained in preponderance in these approaches, to the detriment of writing. But this is not a problem exclusive to foreign language teachers. Teachers in charge of guiding the acquisition of the mother tongue language find today that the issue of readers is decreasing year after year and the effect on development of the skill of writing is becoming more and more evident", they point out.

As described in the work, the workshop consists of the production of a literary text -essentially narrative- as a final task to which several activities are assigned. It is designed for young people from Education secondary school, both in the case of the teaching of the language mother tongue and in the case of a second language, with an intermediate level of skill communicative.

Adaptable to different students

"A literary workshop turns language into an object of reflection and the axis of a communicative status that, despite being created ex profeso for the classroom, makes sense on its own and becomes reality, not a mere imitation of reality", the researchers emphasize.

On the other hand, they add that literary creation "allows language to be a tool, in addition to the object of teaching, to obtain a useful and attractive learning. Likewise, it is a content easily adaptable to different students, depending on their tastes, hobbies, ages, environments, cultures of origin, levels of language...".

As for the methodological design , they divide the didactic proposal into three phases: the preparation, with a brief presentation, the objectives to be achieved and the work techniques used; the analysis phase, which includes the description of what was contemplated, the narration of what was evoked, the collective reading followed by a colloquium and the discussion; and the results and interpretation, to collect through a questionnaire the opinion of the students on the final evaluation of the tasks.

Useful information

The complete article : http://marcoele.com/taller-de-escritura-creativa/