DAVID L. GUGIN

ABSTRACT

This will discuss a series of ESL classroom activities first implemented while teaching university students in Myanmar from 1995 to 1999. The author has subsequently used the same activities with nonnative speakers of English studying at Northern Illinois University in the United States, and in his current position at the American University of Sharjah, in the United Arab Emirates. In all three countries, the students involved were almost all Asian or Arabic, and they were enrolled in my courses for the purpose of practicing and improving their academic writing.

Teaching academic writing is, of course, different than teaching academic writing effectively. From the very beginning, the great majority of students in Myanmar struggled with not so much the linguistic challenges that academic writing presents, but the rhetorical and cultural demands that such writing imposes on any student, and especially on students who are nonnative speakers of English. That is to say, while not grammatically perfect writers, they were quite capable and accurate at the sentence level. However, they had real problems with the formal constraints of the academic writing genre, constraints that are for the most part specific to Western culture. The students required constant reminding of the need to remain objective and impersonal, to avoid "I" writing, to build a case for an argument supported by facts and evidence, and to organize that argument according to a logical, linear structure.

In Myanmar it quickly became clear that this approach was not working well. It also became clear that teaching academic writing to nonnative speakers of English involves a doubling of unfamiliarity that many students cannot manage successfully. In other words, they are being asked to produce writing both in a foreign language and a foreign style (genre), and the latter requirement in particular is problematic for many students. Compounding the difficulty is the fact that they are also typically asked to write about texts and subjects that they often have no initial, surface familiarity with or interest in. It is little wonder then that many students do not succeed at academic writing. In fact, they have almost no real opportunity to do so. The pedagogical challenge faced in Myanmar was how to provide students with that opportunity, that learning space. One possible way of overcoming that challenge was to use literature and narrative writing to seek what Theresa Lillis has aptly called "creative criticality" (2). In the interface between literature and language acquisition, between creative and academic writing, an intriguing solution to this teaching problem emerged.

The approach described in this paper is itself based on the work and experience of numerous researchers, most of whom are themselves classroom teachers. Representative of that work is Phyllis Creme, who has consistently argued for the importance of creativity in English language learning and teaching. For Creme, following a framework first established by the British psychologist D. W. Winnicott, creativity means less the ability to write, for example, a poem, and more the ability, indeed willingness, "to operate in the ‘intermediate world’ between the subjective and objective world" (273). Crucially, according to Creme, in this intermediate world, where the subjective and the objective blend, "the learner and what is learned are separate and autonomous, yet at the same time connected" (273). This sense of connection, or rather, engagement, is what students must have (and are so frequently missing) if they are to achieve their potential as academic writers.

The point here is not creativity for creativity’s sake. What Creme believes is that genre-switching can be a useful, alternative means of enhancing student writing. She claims that "a different genre sometimes enables [her students] to get to the heart of an issue without going through essayist procedures (275). In learning journals, and creative texts like poems and narrative, "the object of study is the student’s engagement with the material, learner-plus-topic," and achieving this object will translate into better academic writing, better college essays, as well (275). As Alice Brand illustrates, expressive or creative writing has historically always had three general purposes. First of all, its use in the classroom was designed to produce creative artists. As such, it was reserved only for those students who showed creative ability. Conversely, a second purpose emerged based on the assumption that creative writing had therapeutic value and was therefore appropriate for all students regardless of their talent levels. Finally, a third group of teachers and scholars came to believe that creative writing could "provide motivation for writing in general that would result in improved expository and communication skills" (77). Without discounting the first two purposes, perhaps the real value of creative writing, at least in an academic context, is that it can indeed generate student motivation – defined here as interest and involvement – for both academic (critical) reading and writing. If such motivation exists, writing improvement can occur.

Creative criticality can be used with any number of texts, but this paper will focus on George Orwell’s "A Hanging," one of Orwell’s most anthologized stories, and a story readily available on the Web as well. Orwell himself lived and worked in Myanmar, then called Burma, for several years, and many of his best stories, including "A Hanging," take place in Myanmar. Whether or not "A Hanging" is truly literature (fiction) or nonfiction is largely immaterial to my intentions. The key point is that it discusses issues still relevant to any student from a country that was once a victim of Western imperialism. In so doing, the story lends itself to creative and academic writing tasks.

"A Hanging" is told from the point of view of an unknown narrator, presumably Orwell, although the reader never knows for certain. The narrator, a British police officer working in a Burmese prison in the 1920s, describes a morning during the rainy season when a condemned prisoner is led from his cell to be executed for an unnamed crime (Orwell). The whole episode takes no more than 20 minutes, and the story is barely over four pages long, but Orwell is still able to mount a very subtle and powerful denunciation of imperialism. He is particularly effective at demonstrating how imperialism inverts and then destroys normal human values, not just for the colonizers (in this case, the British) but for the colonized as well.

As usual, Orwell is acutely sensitive to conformity. All the characters in the story, be they British or Burmese, act, feel, and, most significantly, think identically – simply because they are acting, feeling, and thinking in a way that the social and political structure expects and requires. Therefore, the lesson plan for "A Hanging" begins with a pre-reading activity called "Peer Pressure," in which the students write a first-person narrative discussing and describing a time in their life when they did something they probably should not have done, but they did it any anyway because their peers wanted and convinced them do it. In other words, they write about a time when they "followed the crowd," when they acted and thought according to other people’s beliefs and expectations and not their own.

It should be noted that in addition to helping the students connect to Orwell’s story and message, this kind of first-person experiential writing is typically much more familiar to most students. For that reason, it provides a useful pathway into Orwell’s text and a convenient transition to the next, more complicated, writing task.

After reviewing and discussing "Peer Pressure," the students do a second pre-reading assignment called "Witness at an Execution." The students are a witness, a spectator, at a public execution of an alleged criminal. They are supposed to describe the event – what they see, and what they feel. In addition, they are asked to address other issues such as who they are, if this is their first execution or not, what the condemned person’s crime was, and so on. Since it is highly unlikely that any of the students have actually witnessed an execution, this topic, though still a first-person narrative, requires a good deal of creativity on their part. When the students express shock on their faces and ask: "But what am I supposed to write?" answer: "Make it up." Once they understand that, they do in fact make it up. The author has received some very interesting essays in reply to this prompt, many written from the point of view of young children.

Only after these two writing activities, the students read "A Hanging." It is at this stage when students move from creative to academic writing. In addition to vocabulary-building and character analysis, focus on summarizing, since the ability to summarize – in reading, writing, listening, and public speaking – is a vital skill for university level students. Summarizing in English is also a skill that can be difficult to master for nonnative speakers. With "A Hanging", follow a two-track approach based on William Labov’s original division of oral narratives into six parts: abstract, orientation, complicating action, evaluation, resolution, and coda. Broadly speaking, the orientation establishes the situation or setting (time, place, and characters), the complicating action and resolution refer to the story itself (typically in simple past tense), while the abstract (often omitted), evaluation, and coda identify the point or theme of the story, its meaning (quoted in Hardy 18-19).

Simply put, the students write two summaries. First, they summarize the "event line" – Labov’s orientation, complicating action, and resolution. The students must state what happens in the story, where and when it happens, and to whom. Only then do we focus on questions of meaning. After carefully reviewing the event line with the students, they write a second summary, the "idea line" – Labov’s evaluation and coda. This gets into the essential purpose of the story, discussing, for example, Orwell’s critique of both imperialism and capital punishment and his argument that both of them degrade fundamental human values. Time permitting, also have the students write a response to Orwell’s argument about capital punishment in particular, in which they must agree or disagree with his position and justify their decision.

The summarizing and response assignments are always written in the third-person, and in discussing and evaluating the students’ writing, teachers should emphasize that academic writing requires an objective, impersonal tone which is achieved through formal grammar and vocabulary. Conclude with a post-reading activity that returns to more imaginative writing. The last assignment for "A Hanging" is always an extended narrative (two to three pages) written from the point of view of the condemned man in Orwell’s story. Like the condemned man, the students are told they have just finished their prayers and are standing on the gallows with a cloth bag over their head, waiting for the hangman to pull the lever. In addition, students can respond to some questions, questions that Orwell himself does not answer in the story – who are you? What happened? What was your crime? Were you guilty? What are you thinking or feeling about now? Is there anything you would do differently? Do you forgive your executioners, both British and Burmese? Again, the quality and readability of many of the students’ replies to this assignment is quite high. It is clear that they have internalized (understood) Orwell’s story, and that they also enjoyed writing their own narratives.

As a teacher, what I am ultimately interested in is finding connections, building bridges between apparent opposites, and the creative-critical approach affords me an excellent opportunity to do so. First of all, even though I typically use it within the context of an academic writing course, the approach is not exclusive of other skills, but in fact is a useful way of integrating reading and writing work with activities devoted to listening and speaking. Indeed when teaching in different, less explicitly academic situations where the emphasis was more on conversation and oral communication I have still taught "A Hanging" and used the same lesson plans, but simply summarizing and developing narratives through speaking activities instead of formal writing. In other words, with relatively few modifications, the entire approach can be utilized in a classroom devoted to speaking and listening. Furthermore, I share Anne-Karin Korsvold’s belief that "oral training and response is not enough to develop a productive competence at a high linguistic and cognitive level [and that] writing helps us to express ourselves in a precise, nuanced, and correct manner" (49). Incorporating creativity into a critical writing course frequently pays dividends for students’ speaking and listening skills.

Incorporating creativity also reinforces an argument Mark Schaub makes when he suggests that "second-language writing stands to gain more from first-language composition scholarship in areas that explore the ideological impact of writing-instruction methodology" (88). Clearly, creative criticality (which was developed primarily by teachers working with native speakers of English) has ideological implications in that it challenges the notion that ESL writing is a teacher-controlled, bottom-up, sentences-before-essays process. As Korsvold points out, such a notion of ESL writing implies a method of instruction based on the idea that "textbooks and teachers ‘owned’ the language and set the rules" (47). Korsvold argues that "users must be responsible for the language they appropriate, [so] they must be allowed to develop a voice, their own voice in a foreign language" (47). By promoting investment and engagement in given writing tasks, creative criticality gives students the chance to find and develop their voice as writers. For many of them, it is an exciting discovery, a discovery that enables them to approach previously "foreign" and often boring or intimidating texts with much greater interest and confidence. In short, using literary texts and creative writing assignments is one of the most productive ways I know for achieving the only real goal of language teaching – the act of learning and thus growing as a human being.

Brand, A.G. (1980). Creative Writing in English Education: An Historical Perspective. Journal of Education 162(4), 63-82.

Creme, P. (2003). Why Can’t We Allow Students to be More Creative? Teaching in Higher Education 8(2), 273-77.

Hardy, D. (2003). Narrating Knowledge in Flannery O’Connor’s Fiction. Columbia: U of South Carolina P.

Korsvold, A.K. (1997). Foreign Languages, Writing, and Learning to Speak. European Education 29(2), 47-51.

Lillis, T. (2001). Student Writing: Access, Regulation and Desire. London: Routledge.

Orwell, G. A Hanging. Retrieved on January 15, 2005 from The Literature Network Web site: http://www.online-literature.com/orwell/888/.

Schaub, M. (2003). Beyond These Shores: An Argument for Internationalizing Composition. Pedagogy: Critical Approaches to Teaching Literature, Language, Composition, and Culture 3(1), 85-98.

http://www.hkjtefl.org/2005-Gugin-Orwell.html

Last updated:  27/05/05 PM