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ФИЛОЛОГИЯ
ТІЛ ЖӘНЕ ӘДЕБИЕТ: ҚАЗАҚ, ОРЫС, ШЕТ ТІЛДЕРІ
UDK 372.881
P 26
CREATIVE WRITING TASKS AND EFFECTIVE ACTIVITIES FOR
DEVELOPING STUDENTS’ WRITING SKILLS
Pernebayeva A.K.
Taraz State Pedagogical Institute, Taraz
English Language Teaching is very important because of the global status of English.
English Language Teaching is a process that requires great efforts on the part of all the
participants. It has been said that we cannot really teach the language, we can only create
conditions in which it will develop spontaneously in mind in its own way. Writing is an intricate
and complex task; it is the most difficult of all the language abilities to acquire. Teaching English
writing to Kazakh learners has many challenges. Therefore, they are more prone to committing
errors. Traditional methodologies do not help a lot. Unless the teacher is able to
create an interest
in the minds of the learners, he can‘t expect the desired results.
A good teacher teaches, a better teacher explains, and the best teacher inspires. If a teacher
keeps on teaching following the traditional method, the classroom activities become passive and
monotonous. Therefore, the teacher should try new methods other than the traditional methods of
teaching and make the students be better achievers.
The use of English is more widespread because of the business-environment revolution.
Nowadays, English is used by all people worldwid e because of the ongoing advances in
technology such as internet, and other businesses. English also plays an important role in
education and students are expected to use it effectively. English is necessary for all professions
nowadays. However, teaching English in the Kazakh world is challenging. Many students are
able to understand the language, but most of the students face the problem of communicating
their ideas effectively. The problem is the lack of both: the adequate stock of English vocabulary
and creativity in writing. It is evident that writing is the biggest challenge for many students.
Therefore, many associations exert their effort to improve learning English. Still, it is a very
tough mission for teachers to teach English creatively so that students could become independent
learners and benefit a lot from the innovative teaching techniques adopted by the teacher.
The basic means of learning a foreign language is a language environment, and all other
means are auxiliary. Since school learning process is aimed at the practical mastering a foreign
language, and today writing as an aspect of speech competence is of great importance. Mastering
the written speech allows a man to actually use the knowledge of a foreign language, being
wherein out of the language environment, communicating with native speakers through modern
means of communication. The opportunity to write personal and formal letters, the necessity to
fill the questionnaires, blanks of documents, etc. motivate students to take an active acquisition
of written communication in the target language [3, 145p].
Teaching writing is hard and often frustrating. Mary Williams refers to writing as ‗the
single most complex learning task faced by any child‘ [4, 15-25p.p.]. As it is obvious from the
statement, for decades, teachers have assigned writing, graded it, and watched pages covered in
red ink stuffed into the backs of notebooks, never to be read again. Writing was the most ignored
of the language skills. Traditionally when students wrote in L2 the purpose of writing activity
was to catch grammar spelling and punctuation errors. The writing was carefully controlled or
guided. In more advanced classes students were assigned compositions or other kinds of texts to
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write. The focus in this type of writing was primarily on language structures. Students got good
marks if they wrote texts with as few errors as possible. In order to avoid errors the students
wrote very cautiously, using a very simple language and clichés [2, 87p].
Many teachers will admit to being uncomfortable teaching writing in the first place: while
teacher education programs spend hours upon hours on teaching reading, they spend far less time
on teaching writing, and thus teachers may have no preparation for this work at all.
Students, too,
can easily grow frustrated as they are asked to write more and are assessed more thoroughly on
their writing than ever before, but don‘t see a reward for their work. More writing, as we all
know, is not necessarily better writing. And thus, students didn‘t express themselves completely
as they would want; therefore, the lack of creativity was felt.
The problems of teaching writing are extremely essential. The growth of requirements,
submitted to the written speech of the students, great potentia l of creative writing to improve the
level of acquisition of foreign language speech, the lack of exercises designed to teach creative
writing determine the relevance of the research topic.
Creative Writing is associated with ―freedom, fantasy, imagination, playfulness, making the
familiar strange, generating language‖, etc., most teachers of English will resort Creative Writing
to either as a separate subject or as part of a larger subject called EFL, is in line with the Learner-
centred teaching approach. It stimulates students‘ imagination and originality helping them to
feel the thrill of expressing their own ideas in forms which are different from the usual writing
tasks. When writing creatively students feel free to choose the audience they want to address to.
In this way they liberate themselves from the constraints imposed on by their only reader, the
teacher, who thinks that he/she has to do one single thing: to assess the correctness of the
linguistic form used. Having certain audience in mind, stude nt-writers can identify the particular
context which will determine the form (poetry, prose, drama) and style of pieces of writing. In
their book ‗The Inward Ear‘, Alan Maley and Alan Duff make clear the idea that creative writing
‗is not just writing something down.‘ On the contrary, creative writing is a process, the writer is
redrafting and reformulating ideas until he gets his/her message conveyed. In fact, ‗the writer
does not know what his/her writing will be until the end of the process‘ [5, 83p].
Creative writing can be used at any stage of learning. First, the teacher can offer to the
students of various types of supports in the form of visual and auditory visibility: objects,
pictures, photos, audio texts, songs, instrumental music, videos, and graphics visibility: the
instructions, poems, stories, ready- made samples of written speech.
As the Chinese proverb says: ―A thousand of teachers, a thousand of methods‖, we, too,
believe that every teacher makes his or her own contribution to teaching doing it more unique.
There exist a lot of exercises for writing in textbooks and in manuals. But a set of activities
coming step-by-step is absent; smooth transition from one task into another is needed to get a
product which presents the creativity of the student. That‘s why several methodological
resources are studied and thus a series of creative tasks are designed due to the creative writing
technology.
Teaching writing was a matter of recommending a logically ordered set of written tasks and
exercises, and that good writing conformed to a predetermined and ideal model. This is due to
the product and process approaches which occupy an important place in methodology.
There are at least two approaches in the teaching writing:
1) focus on the process of generation of a written text – writing for learning (process);
2) concentration on the result of writing activities - writing- for-writing (product) [6].
We must always be aware that on which we focus: the learning
process of the writing or on
the product writing, do we want to teach students various genres of written messages, or to teach
their creative writing. Creative writing implies expression of students' own thoughts in a foreign
language in connection with a suggested situation or a topic within the linguistic material
previously assimilated in speech and reading. Students may write different types of essays,
letters, postcards,
journals, descriptions,
book reviews, poems, summaries,
applications, resumes,
etc. While learning to write students may experience some difficulties. For example: