Guided fantasy: An effective strategy in enhancing students’ creative writing

Abstract

Linguistically diverse (LP) students in Hong Kong have to acquire basic competence in reading and writing Chinese to prevent marginalization. However these students are usually directed by teachers’ traditional teaching to “fill in the blanks” in their writing. Teaching literacy skills in creative contexts would invite learners to engage themselves imaginatively which stretches their generative capacities, and persist when they encounter difficulties. The present study aims to explore how guided fantasy (Kirmizi, 2015).which is a creative writing strategy would encourage students’ divergent thinking abilities in Chinese writing. A quasi-experimental design was employed in this study to investigate its effectiveness on LP students’ creative writing ability in heterogeneous classrooms. Eighty-one Grade three students from a school were recruited. They were randomly assigned to an intervention group (20 females and 26 males) and a control group (16 females and 19 males) with two classes in each group. The intervention group employed guided fantasy strategy to learn Chinese writing while the control group used traditional method. Pretest and posttest of writing were implemented before and after the designed lessons to test students’ writing performance. The Chinese Creative Writing Scale with excellent interrater reliability (.90 to .98) was adopted to measure students’ creative writing performance in fluency, flexibility and originality (Cheung, et. al, 2001). Results showed that the test (pre-test vs. post-test) × group (control vs. intervention) interaction reached significance at all three subscales, F=47.58, p<.001, ηp2=.376 for fluency, F=30.39, p<.001, ηp2=.278 for flexibility, and F=5.49, p=.022, ηp2=.065 for originality. Follow-up analyses on improvements (i.e., scores in post-test minus scores in pre-test) showed that, students in intervention group obtained a higher improvement (8.35 on fluency, 7.35 in flexibility, and 2.85 in originality) than those in the control group (2.83 on fluency, 2.63 in flexibility, and 1.83 in originality) in all three subscales, ps<.05. Both intervention group and control group made progress but the intervention group made greater progress than control group. Guided fantasy has the power to involve and excite LP students to write better and teachers should be equipped with creative writing strategies. References: Cheung, W. M., Tse, S. K., & Tsang, W. H. H. (2001). Development and validation of the Chinese creative writing scale for primary school students in Hong Kong. The Journal of Creative Behavior, 35(4), 249-260. Kirmizi, F. S. (2015). The effect of creative drama and creative writing activities on creative writing achievement. Egitim ve Bilim, 40,181.