The EFL writing teacher's dilemma: To teach writing must I be a writer?

Ania Szczypka, Judy Wickham, Manuel Rodis, Elisabeth Kalchgruber, Mario Rinvolucri, Jadwiga Dyl, Felix Tejada, Julia Garcia, Mike Fisher, Alina Matusz, Denise Rodriguez

Ania Szczypka, Judy Wickham, Manuel Rodis, Elisabeth Kalchgruber, Mario Rinvolucri, Jadwiga Dyl, Felix Tejada, Julia Garcia, Mike Fisher, Alina Matusz, Denise Rodriguez formed a group of eleven people who come from different countries: Poland, Spain, Holland, the UK, Brazil, the US and Austria. They all met on a Creative Wrting course at Pilgrims, in 2006.

Menu

Introduction
Who are we as writers?
Our school experience
Further insecurities
The writer within
Computer versus pen and paper
Writing and the teaching task

Must I enjoy singing if I am to teach singing?
Must I be a footballer to coach football?
Must I have learnt a foreign language to teach one?
Must there be a writer inside me to bring it out in others?

These questions came up for a group of eleven of us from Poland, Spain, Holland, the UK, Brazil, the US and Austria, on a Creative Writing course at Pilgrims, in 2006. The questions address the issues of our pleasure, skill, experience and talent in writing. However, the underlying question behind them is:

Ania writes: In fact I have no experience as a writer. The only things I have written in my life are - shopping lists- I create them whenever I go shopping on Saturdays
- letters to my friends. I used to write these some time ago. I gave up doing it because I am a little bit lazy.
- notes to my sons and husband when I go away and want them to remember things.

But I am a teacher and my task is to prepare my students for their school- leaving exams. As they have to be good at writing short texts, letters, essays and other things, I do have to improve my own writing skills.

But, Ania doesn't consider herself to be a writer, she abandoned writing. She feels that she needs to have the skill herself that she seeks to develop in her students. She seems to feel that this is a commonsensical requirement and that all she has to do is get on with it.

People from our author-group come to the task of cultivating their writing skills with painful baggage from the past some of which arises from their school days. They experienced black pedagogy when teachers caused negative reinforcement by using writing as punishment.

Mike says: My first introduction to writing, that I can remember, was as a form of punishment: " Write 100 times 'I must behave in class' " I expanded my writing skills by increasing the number of lines to 200 and finally 1000, at which point my father was asked to come and see the headmaster. He suggested I should be given something constructive to do, instead of lines. My teachers responded by making me write essays to explain my behaviour.
You can imagine how this turned me off writing for a very long time.

However, in the case of Julia there seems to be something inside her, powerful child and adult critical inner voices that are displeased with what she wrote as a child:

Julia says: At that time I enjoyed writing a lot, I used to write terrible poems for Mother's Day and a horrible diary and some short stories . One of them, the strange story of a partridge which went on a rocket to the moon, was given a prize in a school contest and then it was published in the school newspaper. I was eight years old when this happened and I clearly remember how embarrassed I felt and how bad I thought the story was once published. As I grew older, more terrible stories and poems came out of my mind, some of them extremely embarrassing……. Little by little I stopped writing for pleasure fortunately for my family, and I just left writing.

What Julia shows here is early self-consciousness which destroyed her eventual development into a writer. On the other hand, for some people writing is a marvellous way of re-capping or revising stuff learnt in class.

Manuel says: At school I always liked writing , I always used to write my class notes in a well organised way and as a student I wrote summaries in order to understand things better.

It is worth wondering how many teachers of writing in a second language have experienced the same sorts of feelings as Julia did. How many readers of this article will see themselves mirrored in her words? Each teacher with such feelings has somehow to cope with their own emotions when teaching the skills of writing.

Elisabeth experienced something different at university.

Elisabeth says: To finish my English studies at university I had to analyse the role of love in the poetry of WB Yates. I read and dissected lots of his poems as though I had the right to analyse them like a butcher does a piece of meat. Looking back, I think I ought to have written variations, new versions: Had I done this I would have entered much more deeply into WB Yeats' world.

Perhaps many of us have been through the writer de-sensitisation process that university literature course give to young people who are aware of expression and language.

There are EFL teachers of writing who are worried at their own technical level of competence in their L2. This would be the case of Jagoda.

Jagoda says: As I have written at the beginning of this letter I do not consider myself a good writer but rather a poor one. There are three reasons why: I have always had problems with spelling and using appropriate words even in my native language.
When I have to write any kind of text I have to use dictionaries to make sure I have not made any kind of mistake.
I don't feel very confident writing and it takes loads of time.

The voice you have just read may well speak for a very large number of EFL teachers the world over. It is honest and natural to be worried if one's command of the written form of the foreign language leaves much to be desired. In the case of Jagoda, she seems to use rather good English in which to express her doubts about her own written performance. A case of perfectionism?

Manuel expresses his insecurities in this way andf he says: I have to admit another aspect of being a failed writer. I have always liked receiving letters and emails but found it hard to answer them. I didn't know what to write: sometimes I would begin a letter and stop- and read something I had written thinking it was stupid or boring. When I am speaking I think I am normally able to come up with new ideas, but when writing I often feel stuck and just stop. I fear I have lost some potential friends because of this inability to maintain a friendship at a distance through letter writing.

Maybe the harsh voice of self-criticism here reminds you of Julia's contribution above with its severely over-critical tone. Are Manuel and Julia's self-critical stances part of their innate dispositions or are they maybe a result of interiorising

So far few of us have spoken of the joys of writing, though Manuel does, above, as a way of processing work done in school. Elisabeth was a writer who, at seven, used intra-personal, diary writing as an emotional sheet anchor.

Elisabeth says: My first coherent texts were a diary while my Mum was in hospital and I had to live with an old relative of hers. That diary helped me come to terms with the feelings of loss and homesickness and also with the profound disgust I felt for the black (!) mushroom soup I had to eat every evening.( Had I not got it down I would never have been allowed to go and see my mum after her operation).

Clearly here was a seven year-old who instinctively knew what this form of written self-expression was about. All through her childhood and into falling in love times she continued to write.

Felix also clearly integrated writing into his life from an early age and this is a part of what he has to say:

Felix says: When I was seven I started writing poems , my father was a poet and later on I tried writing articles for newspapers or letters to the editor, but never got one published. Later in my life I went back to poems and I started translating other people's poems, too. It gave m e sense of creativity, although at the time, I thought I was faking it. Falling in love and this not being reciprocated by the object of my affections triggered all sorts of poems dealing with the misery of unrequited love. Strangely enough I got some of these poems published.

Is it fair to assume that a person who enjoys written self-expression in L1 may well go on to find similar pleasure in L2 or 3? Though Felix does mention the inordinate amount of term papers I had to do at University he clearly has survived this ordeal with his joy in written language intact.

For some writers the instruments and materials they use for writing may be important.
These words come from Denise's pen:

Denise says: I have been trying not to use the computer, since when you keyboard things in, you tend to summarise them. When you put your pen to paper your ideas flow more easily, you feel more comfortable and there is more intimacy. You kind of feel like telling secrets and opening up.

Whether or not we use pen and paper or the PC to write is a personal choice. Fortunately, we do have the choice as to how we bring our words to paper.

Our author group hoped to walk away from the creative writing course with more than just recipes for writing in and out of class. Through this course each of us has tried to bring out the writer in him or herself. So, what can we bring to the teaching of writing with this better understanding of ourselves as writers?

Firstly, writing is a state of mind. A well planned pre-writing phase sets the mood and the purpose of the task. A relaxed and non-threatening atmosphere can encourage the students' success. Both process and atmosphere are crucial. Good and bad memories, the choice of tools, the appreciation by others of one's work, are all within the teacher's reach through the choice of task.

Secondly, observation is vital to writing because it helps to get a clearer view of the world around us. Objective observation of students can help us see students for whom they really are rather than as the clichés we often make them up to be. Our

Finally, if we teach to the writer in our students and do not only focus on the mechanics, aren't we helping them evolve as people? The purpose of writing in the foreign language classroom is often thought of as practise for examinations and its role in language acquisition is sometimes ignored. Creative writing tasks which emphasise self expression and the creative self can challenge the students' beliefs about the purpose of L2 writing. By emphasising the joy of writing we can provide a chance for practise, freedom and choice as well as reward.

Perhaps the greater our pleasure in writing is and the greater our skill and talent at writing are, the more enthusiasm we transmit to our students. But, much more importantly, it is our awareness of atmosphere, purpose and self - in other words, of the human side of writing - through which they find themselves in English. In letting them find themselves, we find them.

Please check the English for Teachers course at Pilgrims website.
Please check the Creative Writing course at Pilgrims website.