Teaching Creative Writing through Genre-Based Approach
By Senny Suzanna Alwasilah
Dekan Fakultas Ilmu Seni dan sastra
Creative Writing
Creative writing is such an imaginative works that exist from self-excitement and created using aesthetic feeling to pleasure readers. It is an expression of someone’s mind that is translated onto text. The expression could be a feeling, a personal experiences, testimonies or imagination. Creative writing started from a personal interest jotting down into a product of writing in the form of fiction.
To begin to write a creative writing, we might find some sources as our knowledge. It could be from reading hundreds of different books, going to the beach, being part of the campaign, talking with friends, or even sitting alone in such a quiet place. A creative writer usually has a sensitive feeling to catch ideas that is ‘buzzing around’.
Creative writing begins in the sense. Without sense, we cannot create images to make the reader hear, feel, and see. By pure intelligence, we can argue, convince, sway the readers with ideas, but for the creative writers intelligence must be supplemented by the equipment of sensuousness to bound to the things of experience, concerned with people, places, actions, feeling, and sensations.
A teacher of creative writing supposed to be a writer who has bunches of learning strategies that can be implemented into the teaching learning process. Learning to write a creative writing is fun if a teacher provide students with a space to let them write what they want to without being worry about creating bad products of writing. Students creativity to write will flow as a river when teacher do not too strict to students with rules of creating good writings.
One of the triggers to write is by providing materials to be discussed. It can be pictures of the past moments, some drawings, newspapers, or pictures of celebrities. Before starting to write, students might have a peer or a group discussion using the materials a teacher had provided. A teacher can give some time for them argue about the topic because when it come to writing they will have their own perspective and words to be written.
There are some benefits for students in learning creative writing. Besides getting used to expel their personal expression, they also become more aware of creating the language itself. Gradually they can polish their writing to be more communicative. To know how good their writing are, teacher might ask students to ‘publish’ their works to the peers. Let other students read and appreciate their peer’s writing. Sharing the product of writing will bring opportunities to students to ‘show off’ their abilities in producing works. The feeling of pride, self-respect, enthusiasm are some benefits the students can get.
Genre-Based Approach
Nowadays, a genre based approach seems to be such an alternative strategy to teach writing. as proposed by Derewianka (2003) that genre-based approaches are becoming increasingly influential in the field of English language teaching.
As far as I am concerned, teaching creative writing can use genre based approach as well. By telling the students to write one type of genre, teacher encourages them to build a personal experience into their writing. obviously there are types of genre text that could be introduce to students. According to Jan (2009) there are factual text types including factual texts, information reports, procedural texts, explanations, persuasive texts, recounts, and transactional texts, while fictional text types include fictional texts, fictional narratives, information narratives, and poetry.
In my opinion, to teach creative writing, teacher do not need to give students all the types of texts since it might too abundance for them. Teacher can use fictional narrative text to be more focused on how they create their stories. First thing first, students can choose fictional readings to build their knowledge of the filed and to learn the structure of fictional writing existed. Students can ‘steal’ the plot of the story to be re-written in their own texts.
Assessing Creative Writing
To assess creative writing which use narrative text and the involve of the exploration of feeling and imagination is such a difficult work. It is very personal impression and cannot be generated. It is about how to feel the sense of the story, the character, the plot, and the theme of the story. To assess creative writing is just like to assess our own feeling.
Nevertheless, Tredinnick (2006) has given the clue in assessing creative writing, Here is the guideline rubric that can be used.
Good story writing:
Assessing students paper as mentioned by Williams: 1989, is one of one of the most important things the teacher can do, because the decision we make about how we give grades affect students’ lives, sometimes significantly. If we want to be the best teachers we can be, we will want to understand more clearly what is involved in evaluating writing. Even though measuring writing work is not that easy, still teacher have to make a judgment whether students writings are excellent, fair, or worse and need some revisions.
As to make it easy judging of students writing and make less bias on measuring their works, we can create rubric which can see the average of students works and easily put them in a certain level of sophistication. Rubric help teacher manage which students belong to a good, fair, or poor group.***
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