Humanising Language Teaching
Year 5; Issue 3; May 03

Students write about themselves as Writers

[ Editorial note: you could use the texts below to stimulate your students to write about themselves as writers. ]

Sabine writes:

The strange thing about my writing history is that I've always been rather shy about putting my feelings onto a piece of paper, whether a diary or a letter.
But in English it's different . I feel more comfortable, even though, of course, words sometimes don't come too easily. So I prefer to write to English speaking people than to Italian ones. If I describe my feelings in Italian, I find the phrasing too banal or too sentimental. On the other hand my feelings sound better in English……

Monica writes:

Writing to me is a need. I still keep a diary and when I am happy or angry I immediately write down my feeling: it is so sweet, then, two or three years after, to read again and to feel again the same emotions.
I like writing poems, but not so often and I also wrote two short stories: nobody has read them! I also wrote a letter to myself. It is in my drawer and I have to read it just in 2017, because it is a letter to myself as a complete woman, and when I wrote it I still was a girl. It starts in this way:

Cara Monica, ti sei laureata, hai avuto figli, ti sei sposata ?
Dear Monica, did you get your degree, have you had children, have you got married?

Hai raggiunto le cose alle quali tenevi?
Have you achieved the things you set your heart on?

It is a very deep letter and I wrote it in a moment I was little bit in blue. The problem is that sometimes I want to open it, but I must wait 15 years. …..

I enjoy very much e-mail too, espeically because it is very fast.
For me writing is a very personal moment: I like to be alone and it doesn't matter
if I get no answer. My name " la solitaria " and actually I like this interpretation.

I like very much writing my dreams too: I have a special diary for them. And I also write the books I have read in another one and the movies I have seen in a blue one.
I almost write everything of my life!

And, this is the last thing,, I write poems to my boy-friend and hide them in his books, clothes, things…. I love writing!

Ornella writes:

Writing in English can sometimes be hell, especially at the beginning , when I feel embarrassed, but most of the times it's pleasure because it makes me feel creative- I wouldn't say irresponsible – but that's the nice sensation you experience when words come out freely, one after the other, as if in a chain.

Enrica writes:

I like writing more than speaking, being a shy person. I realise now that e-mailing has freed me very much from formal writing. I don't find much difference in writing in my mother tongue and in English, apart from the choice of vocabulary… it all depends on the addressee. For me writing is mostly a social activity; this is why, perhaps, I have never kept a diary.