A pedagogical attempt at integrating EFL creative writing into an English-mediated Linguistics module in Mainland China

This qualitative L2 writing study presents a contextualised response to the movement
of Creative Writing Across the Curriculum. A story-writing assignment is
implemented in an introductory Linguistics module as an alternative medium for
knowledge-construction. The task offered the Chinese students the opportunity to
utilise some recently acquired semantics knowledge for purposeful and idiosyncratic
construction of a short story in English. 110 stories were collected and examined using
a sociocognitive view of “writer voices”, seeing voices as arising from the negotiation
between the writer and various forms of knowledge in the context, such as the target
subject knowledge and the convention of narratives. In order to look for creative
modes of knowledge application and examine how the student writers’ applications of
the target semantics invoke or deviate from established and culturally-rooted cognitive
structures (i.e. “schema”) the stories were initially examined by corpus linguistics
techniques and then manual and hermeneutic coding. Three general tendencies stand
out: the stories show 1) strategic, 2) conventional and 3) creative applications of the
target semantics knowledge. Subsequently, focal students were interviewed
individually. Six focal cases are included here, illustrating characteristic negotiations
between the writer and certain symbolic resources. Overall, the study holds
implication for how EFL creative writing assignments might help stimulating Chinese
students’ knowledge-making potential in a subject context.