21 creative-writing techniques
Letters across the classroom

Secondary and adult
Nicky Burbidge,Peta Gray, Sheila Levy, Mario Rinvolucri

Editorial note: Oxford University Press have kindly allowed HLT to re-publish the Section 3 of Letters, Burbidge,Gray, Levy and Rinvolucri, 1996, even though the book is still in print. We will offer you the exercises in Section 4 in the March 2005 Issue of HLT.
If you find these 21 exercises produce good results with your students you will probably want to buy the book. Enjoy it!

Usually, in this section, we look forward to work yet to be published. In this case we are breaking the rule and bringing you a quarter of a book that has been around for some ten years.

Letters across the classroom

The basic idea behind this chapter of Letters is that a writer needs a reader and that an available and natural reader is another member of the class. Teachers who believe in a communicative classroom are happy to see students talking to eachother in pairs, and we have come to feel the same about students writing to each other across the classroom. We maintain that the same communicative principles that inform oral work should inform the written mode. Many writingcourses have students writing without an addressee, which simply makes the taskharder for most people.

You might object that it is absurd to have people who can communicate orallywriting to each other across the room. The amazing thing is that, once the students have got used to the oddity of the situation, they really do express them-selves differently, and often more fully, in writing than they would do orally.The shy individuals blossom, as do students who need time to compose their thoughts and language. Letter writing also gives the class a break from orallydominant individuals. But students need not be confined to writing to each other. There are ideas here for starting up correspondences with you, the teacher,and even writing to themselves - writing can be a form of inner dialogue as wellas a means of communicating with other people.

If you are running a course that leads to a written exam, you may find the ideas in this chapter helpful as they allow you to establish a class culture of studentswriting to each other and being read by each other. The activities presented hereare designed to get the students writing to each other as naturally as they talk to each other in the foreign language. This allows them to find a written voice in English, which can then be adapted to the particular types of writing they have to do for the exam.

The activities in this chapter are divided into two groups: those for use early inthe course, and those for use at any time. There are many more ways of launching and sustaining a letter-writing culture than we have space to set out here: our main contribution is perhaps not the set of activities but the letter writing state of mind. If your students acquire this, you will find that plenty ofnew activities will suggest themselves.

For use early in the course

3.1 A'model' letter

Dear Teacher,

You have asked us to write you a letter, but I don't really know what to write about. I suppose you want me to tell you something about myself. OK then, here goes. I come from Puerto Sordo, a little town in Tierra del Fuego in the South of Argentina. I have been learning English for twenty-five years and I hate the language. Actually, no, I like punctuation in English.

My age? I'm fifteen but sometimes I feel more like eighteen. Some people treat me as if I was twelve. Strange, isn't it?

Teachers always want to know about your hobbies (do they really?) My hobby is sleeping. I do this every night for at least 14 hours.

My main ambition? I want to be able to forget everything that makes me angry and upset. Do you sometimes want this too?

A word about my family. My father is an insomniac and my mother does sleep research. She keeps waking him up to ask him scientific questions. I am their eldest child and I have ten brothers and five sisters who are older than me.

I'd like to find out some things about you. Do you like geraniums, and when did you last fly a kite?

Yours,

3.2. Dear Everybody

OUTLINE:
Your students write you letters to which you reply with a single letter to the whole group, quoting from some of their letters. (This works best as an ongoing activity.)

PREPARATION: (Between lessons 1 and 2)
Read the students' letters and write a 'Dear Everybody' letter in reply. You need to budget 5-10 minutes' writing time per student letter quoted in your answer. Make enough copies of your reply for each student to have one.

Lesson 1
1 Ask the students to each write you a letter as homework. Explain that the content of the letter is entirely up to the individual, but that when you answer the letters, with a single reply to the whole class, you will be quoting from some of them.

Lesson 2
2 Give out the copies of your response and let the students read silently. If you have a class of 20 or less, simply be available to give the students individual help with comprehension. In larger classes, you may want to pre-teach some of the harder bits of the language.
3 Ask the students to answer your letter for homework. The correspondence can continue for as long as you, and they, decide.

VARIATION 1:
Ask the students, for homework, to write you a letter. Answer each letter individually. This individual correspondence can then carry on at a mutually agreeable pace. For further information about this tech-nique, see Seth Lindstromberg: The Recipe Book (1990), page 85.

VARIATION 2:
Use the technique described in Variation 1 with selected students with whom you feel you get better contact via the written channel. If you are a teacher-trainer, you may find this idea useful with certain trainees.

VARIATION 3:
Ask the whole group to write to one student. The student replies, quoting slices of other students' letters and commenting on them, or using them as springboards for further thought.

COMMENTS:
1 The techniques outlined in the Procedure grew out of Variation 1.
However, we have found that answering individual students' letterscan be both time-consuming and emotionally draining. It is also a secret communication between the teacher and individuals in the class and this may detract from the life of the group.

2 A serious danger in the main activity above is that the teacher may quote things that the students may not really want quoted, oromit things they would like the rest of the class to know. You need to exercise care and tact in your reply to the class.

3 Students will regularly ask to have their work back corrected. In his testing of the technique, Mario has refused to do this on the following grounds. The aim of this activity is self-expression in English, with the students attempting to say what maybe they can't yet say with any degree of accuracy. In some students, correctioin can produce a desire to write for the red pencil and not for the real addressee (the teacher, and beyond the teacher, the other students) and if the teacher corrects the letter, it has to be returned to the writer, which is a pretty odd thing to do in communication terms. But if you really want to correct the letters, then work on photocopies and give those back.

Dear Everybody,

How would you feel if you had just received 13 letters from people you are to think about a lot over 10 weeks? Some people leave ample margins down the sides of their letters, while others fill the whole space, left and right. Some people have strong, flowing hand-writing, while others make their letters small and tight.

It was nice of you, Kaholi, to be so open and honest about your first impressions. I'll try hard not to be too strict and stubborn! Stubborness is one of my characteristics, and in some situations it can be useful.

Today has been an important day for me. My wife, Sophie, had her fifty-first birthday party and our five-and-a-half year-old son was quite excited about it. What are birthdays without small kids around? I shopped and cooked veal in Marsala (a sweet wine)...

3.3 Co-operative writing

Lesson 1
1 Get the students up and moving about. Tell them they are to form threesomes that will stay together over the course or term in order, from time to time, to write letters to you, the teacher.
2 Ask the threesomes to write their first letter to you. Give them a 30-minute time limit. Tell them they can write about anything that interests all three of them.
3 At the end of the lesson, take in the letters. If you have a class of 30, you will have 10 letters to respond to. Photocopy your responses so that each student gets their own copy.

3.4 Forward to the past

OUTLINE
Students at the start of a course write letters to each other looking back over the course, as if they were writing after it has ended.

PROCEDURE
1 Early on in a course, before friendships have formed, ask the students to talk about their expectations of the course in pairs. Student A talks while Student B listens and encourages. Student B then talks while Student A listens.
2 Ask each student to imagine that the course is over. Then tell them to write a letter to a friend made in the group in which they describe some of their experiences and feelings during the course. Correct the students' writing individually as they work.
3 Tell the students to leave their letters on their desks. Students then go round reading each others' letters.
4 Ask the students to keep their letters. At the end of the course, tell them to look at the letters again. It will probably boost their confidence to see how much their English has improved. They may also be interested to see whether or not their predictions were right!

COMMENTS You may feel that looking backwards into the future is an odd thing to do. We have found that the change in time perspective allows students to explore their expectations. Another aspect of this activity is that people make explicit to themselves and others some of their friendly feelings towards other students.

3.5 What do you think of the show so far?

OUTLINE:
Students write letters to each other about the course, with a copy to you.

PROCEDURE:
Lesson 1
1 Ask each student to write a letter about the course so far to a person of their choice in the group. Tell the students that their letters will be copied for you to read too.
2 The students deliver their letters and the recipients read them. You then take in the letters for copying.

Lesson 2
3 In the next class, return the letters to their addressees.

COMMENTS:
By asking the students to write feedback thoughts to classmates, you are tapping into the warmth of their relationships with others in the group. By not yourself being the direct recipient of the feedback, you may considerably enrich it.

VARIATION 1:
With teenagers, ask them to write a letter to a member of their family describing what they feel about the class. These are shared round the group before being sent to the person concerned, with a translation into the mother tongue if necessary.

VARIATION 2:
The same as Variation 1, except that the students know from the outset that the letter will not go to the addressee.

3.6 Write now, read later!

OUTLINE:
Early in the course or term, the students write a letter to themselves which they `receive' later on.

PROCEDURE:
Lesson 1
1 In a lesson near the start of a course or term, ask the students to write private letters to themselves which they will receive in the middle, or towards the end of the course or term. The content of the letter is entirely in their hands. Be available to give language help, but don't look over people's shoulders unless asked to.
2 Give out the envelopes so that the students can address them and seal their letters inside. Collect the letters, and keep them in a safe place.

Lesson 2 (towards the end of the course)
3 The students receive the letters they wrote to themselves near the start of the course. Remind them that these were written to be private, but make it clear that they are free to share what they wrote if they feel like doing so.

VARIATION 1:
Each student picks the name of a classmate from a hat and writes a letter to him or her. Collect in the letters and, after a few days, give them to their addressees.

VARIATION 2:
On the last day of a course in an English-speaking country, each student writes a letter to themselves back at home the following week, and the letter is posted to their home address.

VARIATION 3:
Instead of using the technique outlined above as a one-off activity, get the students to do it regularly over a course or a term. They will end up with a diary of the passing weeks.

VARIATION 4:
At the beginning of lesson 1 bring in a sealed envelope addressed to yourself, open it in class, and read out a letter you apparently wrote to yourself two months ago.

This is a dramatic and very clear way of getting over the idea of writing a letter to oneself to receive at a later date.

3.7 Letters about letters

OUTLINE:
Students answer a letter from the teacher about their own letter-writing habits.

PROCEDURE:
Lesson 1
1 Give each student a copy of Worksheet 3.7 and ask them to reply to the letter individually for homework.

Lesson 2
2 Group the students in fours or fives to read each others' letters about letters. You may decide to use these student letters as a starting-off point for a correspondence with them.

I am really curious to know how letter writing fits into your life, if at all. Can I ask you a few questions?

Do you like receiving letters and cards? Who do you mostly get them from? How often do you write letters and cards? Who are they to, mostly? How easy/ difficult are these messages to write?
How long are they?
Where are you typically when you write them?
What goes on in your head as you prepare to write a letter?
Do you just sit down and write steadily from the 'Dear X' through to your signature, or is your process different from this?
Do you hang on to letters, or do you post them straight away?
What advantages, if any, do you think phoning has over writing a letter?

I'd very much like to read your answers to these questions, and to any other questions that these bring to mind. Maybe other people in the group would like to read your thoughts too? Maybe you could reply in time for the next class?

3.8 Imagine we've met before

OUTLINE:
Students pick a person to write to and describe a fantasy previous meeting.

PROCEDURE:
1 Put this picture on the board.

Elicit all possible ways of saying 'Hello, remember me?' and drill it.

2 As a warm-up activity, pair the students at random and ask them to imagine they have met before but can't immediately 'remember' where or when. They 'remind' each other. After a few minutes, ask them to change partners and repeat the activity. Get them to change partners frequently until they have relaxed and become inventive.
3 Ask the students to write a letter to someone else in the class. In the letter, they should describe a fantasized previous meeting with him or her. Allow between 20 and 30 minutes.
4 Tell the students to either deliver their letters by hand, or hand them in for marking as they wish. If the students agree, you could display their letters for the rest of the class to read.

3.9 Getting to know you better

OUTLINE:
Students interview a classmate, then write a letter describing them.

PROCEDURE:
1 Ask the students to pair up with a person they know well, or who they would like to know better. Explain that they are going to write a letter about that person. The letter could be to you, or to someone else the whole class knows, for example another teacher. Give them 10 minutes to interview each other, either finding out new facts, or checking those they already know.
2 Give the students 15-20 minutes to organize their notes into a plan, deciding which pieces of information should go into which paragraphs of their letter.
3 Explain that they have 15 minutes to write the letter from their plans. As in an examination, they must work on their own in silence. Tell them they may use a dictionary.
4 Ask the students to reread their letters and to underline a maximum of three phases that they think need correction. Tell them, for each phrase, to try to think of an alternative way of saying the same thing. They should then decide which of the alternatives is preferable in terms of comprehensibility and correctness. As they do this, walk around giving help where it is needed.
5 Get the students to swap work, read the letter about themselves, and write a comment on the bottom if they want to.
6 Ask the students to leave the letters about themselves on their desks and walk around reading the other letters. Tell them to jot down expressions they particularly like or are impressed by.
7 To round off the activity, have a brief feedback discussion with the whole class.

In our experience, students are very good at spotting weaknesses in their own written work. The aim of step 4 is to train them to have a little more confidence in their ability to check, correct, or reformulate their own work. This is a useful skill for examinations.

For use at any time

3.10 Battle of the sexes

OUTLINE:
Students discuss a questionnaire before writing a letter to someone of the opposite sex about being the sex they are.

PROCEDURE: 1 Divide the class into male and female groups. Ask the students to get into pairs within their groups, and give out one copy of the questionnaire to each pair. The students work through it.
2 Ask each student to write a letter to a member of the opposite sex on what they feel about being the sex they are.
3 Organize the students in mixed-sex groups of six to eight people. Each person reads out the letter they have written. This may lead to general discussion.

COMMENTS:
1 In this activity, letter-writing serves as a quiet, slow, reflective phase, sandwiched between the initial same-se work on the letter or questionnaire, and the final mixed discussion.
2 You need to know your students well before using this activity.

I am glad to be a woman because women can feel things that men will never be able to feel, like having a baby inside you: you are the person who gave it life, and after horrible pains it's a miracle because you see the child who has been growing inside you.

A woman is very sensitive, and this is a good thing as it allows her to understand a man, forgive him, and make him happy so he feels like the most important person in the world. She is a mother, and she can do the same thing with her children when they have problems.

Women cry, shout, and get angry a lot, but they always love and take care of everything around them, so I like being a woman.

In your society:

1 What advantages are there to being a man?
2 Men live in a male world and women live in a female one. How true is this?
3 Which is more welcome, a baby son or a baby daughter?
4 How are girls treated in childhood compared with boys?
5 Do women ever ask men out?
6 Can a woman propose marriage to a man?
7 Who makes the decisions about money in the house?
8 Do men and women get equal pay for equal work?
9 What top jobs do women very rarely get?

3.11 Changing sex

OUTLINE:
Each person is interviewed in the role of a person of the opposite sex who they know well. They then write a letter to the person they have been role-playing.

PROCEDURE:
1 Get the students up and moving about. Ask them each to find a partner they feel comfortable with. (Moving round the room allows students to choose a partner freely - they don't feel obliged to choose their neighbour.)
2 Explain that person A in each pair is to choose a person of the opposite sex to role-play. This should be a person they know well, but not another member of the class. They should sit like the person they have chosen to role-play and try to talk the way that person would. Get two or three students to show how their person would sit and to describe what he or she might be wearing.
3 Student B in each pair now interviews student A's role-character. The content of the interview is totally open, but can cover areas such as present situation, background, childhood, and relationships with people of the opposite sex. The interview should last 10 to 15 minutes.
4 They then change over so that student A interviews and student B role-plays.
5 Ask the students to write a letter to the person they have just role-played. Tell them this letter will be entirely private-neither you, nor anyone else in the group will see it. If they want your help with language, they can simply write the sentence they want help with on a separate sheet of paper. In this way you can be technically useful without invading their privacy.

COMMENTS:
1 We feel that there should be times set aside in the language class when students write privately. Writing for yourself in the target language suggests you are really willing to make it your own.
2 As with 3.10 `Battle of the sexes', you need to know your students well before using this activity in class. Students from some cultures may find the concept of `changing sexes' difficult, even offensive.

3.12 To me at three

OUTLINE:
Students talk about early memories and then write to themselves at that age from the present.

PREPARATION None

PROCEDURE:
1 Tell the class one of your earliest memories. Give them time to absorb it and to ask for clarification if necessary.
2 Ask the students to find a partner and take it in turns to spend precisely three minutes each talking uninterruptedly about their earliest memory. The listener should give full attention to his or her partner and remain silent if the speaker needs time to pause and reflect.
3 Ask the students to change partners and do the activity again. They can either tell the same story again or, if an earlier memory presents itself, change to that.
4 Ask the students to change partners again and to do the activity a third time, but this time they should refer to themselves in the third person, for example instead of `I was taken to ...', `He/she was taken to ...' . Remind them they are free to change to another memory whenever an earlier one presents itself.
5 Invite the students to recount their earliest memory to the whole group, but do not try and force anyone who is reluctant to do this.
6 Ask the students to write a letter to themselves at the age of their earliest memory. They should write from where they are now, knowing what they now know.
7 Invite the students to display their letter on their desk or the wall so that others can read it, or to exchange letters with a partner they have not worked with during this lesson.
8 Ask whether anybody remembers more of their early life now than they did at the beginning of the lesson.
9 If anyone looks as if they are finding it hard to come out of their memories, finish off the session by pulling their attention into the present. Here are some suggestions for how to do this:
- Ask them to tell the class about their favourite TV programme/recipe/outfit and to work out exactly when they last watched/cooked/wore it.
- Ask them to list all the objects they can see and name in one minute.

VARIATION:
You may like to leave the writing exercise for homework. If you do this, remember not to leave out step 8 (and 9 if necessary) as it is important to bring the students back into the present.

COMMENTS:
1 This is an adaptation of a co-counselling exercise.
2 We have found that some students cannot remember being very young at first, but gradually their memories get earlier. If someone protests that they have no really early memories, then encourage them to tell the earliest they have available, or allow them to spend the time explaining that they are unable to bring any to mind. It may help to give them the line `I have no memories at all before the age of ...'
3 It is important that the students do not perceive this activity as a competition for the earliest or for the most entertaining anecdote. The emphasis should be on empathetic listening skills rather than on the accuracy of the language used in the telling. The role of the teacher is to model good listening, to take or delegate responsibility for timing (which should be tight), and above all to participate.

3.13 At a different age

OUTLINE:
Students choose an age they would like to be. They write letters to others in the class from the age of their choice and are written to at the same age.

PROCEDURE:
Lesson 1
1 If you have a large class, divide the students into sub-groups of 10 to 15. If possible, get each group to sit in a circle so that they can see each others' faces.
2 Ask each student to decide on an age they feel like being (older, or younger, than their real age). Explain that they will be writing letters to other people in their sub-group from the standpoint of that age. Also explain that they should address other students at the ages they have chosen. Ask everyone to write a label with their name and chosen age in large letters and either pin it to themselves or put it on the desk in front of them.
3 Students write letters to each other within their sub-groups. Make yourself available to help with language. In our experience, students need a lot of help with register. As soon as a student has finished a letter they should deliver it. The receiver may well want to reply. At the end of the lesson, collect the letters.

Lesson 2
4 Use two or three of the letters written in the previous lesson to teach the students more about appropriate written register.

VARIATION 1:
Ask the students to write letters to each other in role as another member of their family who is of the opposite sex. So, for example, a Spanish student, Juan, might choose the role of his aunt, Maria Jesus. As in the activity above, the students write labels for themselves in role. So Juan would write `Dona Maria Jesus, Juan's aunt'.

VARIATION 2:
Tell the students that today, for half an hour, they can be another person and write in role as that person. They can change such things as their social class, historical period, sex, age, or religion. Again, they write labels for themselves so other students are clear about who they are writing to.

VARIATION 3:
Put pictures of well-known figures, from past or present, round the walls. Students choose a figure they feel like impersonating and go and sit below it. In role, they then write a letter to another figure that has a student sitting below it. Correspondences ensue.

VARIATION 4:
Students who are studying a novel or play write to each other as one of the characters. What might a student Portia write to a student Shylock.

Acknowledgements
Variation 2 is based on an oral exercise we learnt from Elayne Phillips, who trained two of us. Variation 3 comes from student work directed by Sue Leather.

3.14 From a leaf to a tree

OUTLINE:
Students write letters to each other in class in role as a leaf or a tree.

PREPARATION:
Collect twigs or branches from common trees to take into class.

PROCEDURE:
1 Ask some students to come to the board and draw their favourite trees and name them in English. Check they can name the parts of the tree, for example: roots, trunk, branch, bud, bark.
2 Pass the twigs and branches you have brought in round the group. Ask the students to identify which trees they come from.
3 Get everybody up and moving around the room. Tell them to each find a partner. One person in each pair is to role-play being a tree and the other the leaf or needle of the same tree.
4 As the students finish writing their letters, each tree exchanges letters with their leaf. They answer each other's letters.
5 When the answers have been written, ask the students to stick the groups of four letters up round the walls and to read and enjoy as many of the correspondences as they can.

VARIATION 1:
Instead of pairing the students at the start of the activity, divide the class into two halves: one half are the trees and the other half are the leaves. The leaves write letters to the trees and the trees write letters to the leaves. As soon as a student has finished, they should give their letter to a student in the other group who has also just finished. The partners then reply to each other's letters.

VARIATION 2:
Allow the students to choose whether they want to write as a leaf or as a tree. When they have written their first letter, they reply to their own letter as the receiver of the the first letter, so if they first wrote as a tree they reply as a leaf.

VARIATION 3:
Parts of any whole can write to the whole, or to other parts. The chassis of a car might write to the car, or to the steering wheel, the clutch, or the brakes. If the river were the whole, a meander might write to it, or to a waterfall, an estuary, or rapids.

COMMENTS:
Students are usually asked to do things in English that they have done in their own language. There is no sense of new self -expression. This activity is something they have probably never done before in any language, and consequently English is being used to explore.

Dear Fir tree!

I'm one of your needles. I've understood the situation.

I'm packing up. I'm going to leave you in a few days.

Direction North! Another fir tree, a relative of mine, is waiting for me to celebrate together the Christmas time.

With this write I want to say you goodbye and to thank you for all you've done for me.

See you,

Yours Needle

Dear Leaf

It looks like the men are coming to get me, because I saw them when they finished their day's work yesterday and they were just three rows from me, so I think that today they are going to beat me to make my olives fall down. I am writing to you because you can fall down with the olives and because you will not be able to eat anymore from my branches.

I want to tell you that it has been very nice for me having you in my branches and being part of me. Don't be afraid maybe you can survive the fight that I have to suffer every year at this time.

Good luck, yours,

Tree

3.15 Different walks

OUTLINE:
Students introduce three people to their partner by imitating their walks. The partner chooses one of the three, and is written to as from that person.

PROCEDURE:
1 Take the students to a space where they can walk freely, out of doors perhaps.
2 Ask one student to stand close behind you and to imitate the walk your are going to do. He or she should walk as close behind you as possible.
3 Now imagine you are going to walk with a person you know well. You feel good to be with them and you walk exactly as they are walking. Start walking like this person, with a feeling of their presence beside you and the look of their face in your mind's eye. The student behind you imitates the walk.
4 Explain to the students that they are to work in pairs. One student imagines themselves walking with three people they know well, and, copies, in turn, each one's way of walking. The other student imitates the walks, staying as close behind as possible. The pair must walk long enough for the student behind to really feel each style of walking. The student in front does not tell their partner anything about the three people he or she is thinking of. 5 The students then swap roles.
6 Once the pairs have done their six walks, ask each student to choose the walk they imitated which most intrigued them.
7 Take the students back to the classroom and tell them that, as owner of the walk their partner has chosen, they are going to write a letter in role as the person they were thinking of. They should introduce themselves in their letters.
8 The students then give their letters to their partners and the pairs talk about the person presented through the chosen walk. If there is time, they can talk about the people who were not chosen as well.

COMMENTS:
There may be some of your students for whom walking in the English lesson may be a relief. Writing will come as a relief to those students who don't initially see much point in waddling around aping other people's way of walking. The talking phase will feel good to those who find the written medium too slow and painstaking. The three main activities balance each other and form a neat lesson whole.

Acknowledgements

We learnt the germ of this exercise from Mike Shreeve on an NLP course at Pilgrim's. He called it 'In your moccasins' and used it to help us mirror other people and to get on their wavelength.

3.16 Maths letters

OUTLINE:
Students write to each other about how they feel as Maths learners.

PROCEDURE:
1 Pair the students. Show them your hand and ask them to work out how many combinations of three fingers they can find in the five fingers of one hand: For example one combination is thumb, forefinger, and middle finger. Give no help with how to solve the problem. (Students usually come up with answers between 8 and 20. The correct answer is 10.)
2 Ask the students to recall the people who have taught them Maths. Ask how many Maths teachers they have each had. Ask four or five people to describe the Maths teachers they remember most clearly.
3 Tell the students who feel good about Maths to sit on one side of the room and the students who don't to sit on the other.Ask them to write letters to students in the other group about how they feel as maths learners.
4 Round off the lesson by getting the students to put up their exchanges of letters on the wall so that the whole class can share them.

VARIATION:
Instead of Maths, take other areas which some people find difficult and others find comparatively easy, for example learning to drive - or learning a language!

Acknowledgemts
We learnt the finger combination exercise from Dick Tachta, a Silent Way Maths teacher.

3.17 Unfinished letters

OUTLINE:
Each student receives a letter addressed to them by another student, but only half-written. They finish it in the same mindset and style.

PROCEDURE:
1 Ask the students to find a partner they are happy to work with for the rest of the lesson.
2 Ask them to sit apart from their partner and start a letter to them. Tell them they have at least 30 minutes to write this letter.
3 After 15 minutes, ask the students to stop writing and to exchange their letters with their partners. The partner now continues writing the letter to themselves as if they were the other person. Tell them to maintain the same style, and to try to feel and understand how the original writer would want the letter to continue to its conclusion.
4 The partners now come together and compare what they have done. They also check over each other's writing for mistakes.
5 Each pair joins up with another pair and they see what the other two have done.

3.18 To myself as if from someone else

OUTLINE:
Each student takes on the role of another student in the class and writes to themselves from that role.

PREPARATION:
Make sure there is a hat, a small bag, or something similar, for each group of eight to ten students.

PROCEDURE:
1 Divide the students into groups of eight to ten. Tell them each to write their name on a small piece of paper, fold it, and put it in the hat.
2 Each student takes a name from the hat and assumes the role of that person.
3 In their assumed role, they write a letter to their real selves on any topic.
4 Students now give their letter to the person whose role they assumed. This person reads it out to the rest of the class or group. 5 Leave time for discussion at the end. Students often want to describe things which emerge from this activity, such as how they felt in another person's skin, and how they felt seeing themselves through another's eyes.

3.19 In three roles

OUTLINE:
Students write to each other in three roles: as parent, child, and other parent.

PROCEDURE:
1 Divide the class into groups of eight to ten, and get each group to sit in a circle.
2 Tell the students to imagine that the person on their left is their child.
3 When the 'parents' have finished their letters, they hand them to their left, to their 'children'. Everybody now assumes the role of child and writes an answer to their 'parent'.
4 When the 'children' have finished their letters, they hand them to their right, to their 'parents'.
5 Everybody now assumes the role of the parent of the opposite sex. For example, if they first wrote as 'mother', they now write as 'father'. They reply to their 'child's' letter, which was written to the other parent. 6 Everybody hands their letter to their left, to their 'child'.
7 Get the students to display their letters, so the rest of the class can read them.

VARIATION:
You can do this activity with any three interlinked roles. For example a manager writes to his client about her decision not to place an order; the client replies; the Managing Director replies to the client.

COMMENTS:
The beauty of this activity is that the students experience three different roles in quick succession, which allows them to write in three different voices.

3.20 Some more ideas...

PROCEDURE:
Give the students half a dozen small sheets of paper each. Tell them they have 20 to 30 minutes to write to any of their classmates in English. Once a letter has been written, it is signed and delivered. Students who receive letters often want to reply to them. Your classroom hums with fast, lively writing and reading.

VARIATION 1:
In some groups, popular students get all the letters and others get very few. To reduce this tendency, start the activity by asking the students to all write a letter starting 'Dear SomeBody', which they sign. Put all these letters in a pile. Each student takes one and answers it. They are then free to write to anybody in the group.

VARIATION 2:
You can use the 'writing to each other' technique to launch a theme. You ask each student to write to one other person about the theme. Students who are happy to read out the letters they have received then do so.

Acknowledgements
These ideas are from Lindstromberg (ed.): The Recipe Book (Pilgrims-Longman 1990).

3.21 Ghost writing

PROCEDURE:
1 Pair the students. Student A decides on a person in the group she wants to send a letter to. She tells Student B, her partner, to write to this person on her behalf. Student B writes as A, in the first person. Student A defines the content and tone of the letter.
2 Student B chooses a person in the group she wants Student A to write to on her behalf and tell A what to write.
3 They then simultaneously start penning letters as their partner's ghost writer.
4 When both have finished writing, they give the letters to each other for correction and signing. The letter originator may decide to correct and change things before signing. The letters are delivered.
5 People receiving letters reply via their ghost writer. It is vital that the students should be engaged in simultaneous writing; they should not end up dictating text to each other.

COMMENTS:
This activity is particularly rich at upper-intermediate and advanced levels.

Acknowledgements
For a more detailed presentation of this idea, see Lindstromberg (ed.): The Recipe Book (Pilgrims-Longman 1990).