Exploring literary texts to develop students’ creative writing skills: proposed activities for Spanish as a foreign language

Abstract

Literary texts offer a rich environment for language learning that teachers can exploit to develop not only students’ linguistic (pragmatic, discursive) and cultural skills, but also communication and creative skills. In our study, we have used literature with different writing activities that involved the use of students’ imagination and creativity. In order to develop these skills, which require students’ communicative competence as well as their imagination, we need for them to be able to create the meaningful contexts that lie within fictional stories. The assumption is that, as students become familiar with the characters in the novels, they will be able to recreate situations that make sense for those very stories, generating a shared world in which they could immerse themselves. In that shared world, they would be able to participate in possible dialogues and build stories that could have taken place, thus developing their creative and communicative skills. In this paper, we show how the literature-based learning activities that we have designed following this hypothesis have helped students empathise with characters in novels and imagine fictional worlds. Such new fictional worlds have in turn empowered students to communicate in Spanish in an authentic way, that is, in a way that is similar to that of the characters in the novels.