Teach English in Yuze Zhen - Changzhi Shi

Creative writing allows English Language Learning (ELL) students to express themselves in the classroom while gaining invaluable English experience. Students who balk at the idea of filling in worksheets or others who avoid speaking during class time may feel more comfortable expressing their English abilities through the controlled writing environment. Furthermore, ELL students have a chance to display their imagination, personality, and individuality to their classmates and their teacher when they participate in a creative writing activity. Though creative writing activities may be freeing to some students, others may have no idea what to write about or may feel stifled by their lack of knowledge and/or confidence in English vocabulary and grammar. Introducing ELL students to the idea of blackout poetry and allowing them to create a poem or story (depending on their language level) using this method eliminates some of the anxiety surrounding storytelling and causes students to slow down and consider how they form English sentences and string them together to form a coherent story. So, what is blackout poetry? To create blackout poetry, one must first find a piece of writing— another poem, a book excerpt, a newspaper article, etc.— that s/he would like to alter. Then, as the name implies, s/he would use a marker to blackout (or obscure) words in the original piece of writing so that s/he can create his/her own poetry. Essentially, someone uses a predetermined set of words, with a predetermined order, to form his/her own work. Though this method is traditionally used to create poetry, at least from what I have seen, this same method could also be applied to create sentences (probably for beginner level students) or even a short story (for more advanced students). The set-up for a blackout poetry classroom activity is relatively easy. First, a teacher must find a piece of writing that falls within the abilities of his/her class level. It may be helpful for the teacher to find a piece of writing that follows the themes that recent lessons have covered in class so that students are aware of most of the vocabulary present within the piece. For difficult vocabulary which students are unfamiliar with, the teacher can introduce the students to these terms in the study section of their lesson plan before commencing the activity in the activate phase. Furthermore, teachers can prepare their own examples of blackout poetry to use as a demonstration before the lesson. Seeing the teacher’s example will hopefully make the blackout poetry instructions easier to comprehend for the students. By allowing students to create sentences and stories using pre-written works, teachers shift the students’ focus from thinking about vocabulary to considering how to order the words to form a proper sentence. The written piece acts like a word bank, showing the students the words they are able to pull from to form their sentences. When students think about the sentence they want to form, and what words they want to choose, they will need to stop and think about which words they can logically string together, and which words would form an incoherent sentence. For example, if a student chooses his/her first non-marked-over word to be “He,” s/he would have to pass over a verb such as “are” to find the verb that actually matches the pronoun. Additionally, the student would need to ensure that s/he includes a subject and a verb in every sentence, as well as punctuation. The student would need to consider whether the sentence s/he forms is a complete sentence, a run-on sentence, or a sentence fragment. Furthermore, the creative aspect of the assignment would hopefully encourage students to create more complex, imaginative sentences. Encouraging the students to have fun and making them excited to share their projects with their classmates will ensure that students not only practice forming coherent sentences, but also focus on telling a story with their writing. Because of the creative nature of the activity, blackout poetry may appear daunting to some students and they may struggle throughout the assignment. I think one of the best ways to help students is for the teacher to ensure that the assignment is catered to his/her students’ level. For less advanced students, the teacher can make sure that the written piece has less advanced vocabulary and lower the expectations of the student output—i.e. have students create one strong, creative sentence rather than string together a paragraph. For advanced students, teachers can encourage students to create longer stories, or even try their hand at poetry. If students are struggling to come up with a sentence, teachers can diagram the basic sentence structure on the board and go through the process with students who want extra help. If the advanced students are having difficulty finishing their longer assignment within class time, teachers can either allow for extra time in the subsequent lesson, or allow students to take the assignment home. Like all other assignments, students may struggle with blackout poetry for various reasons, but the teacher can adapt the lesson to ensure that all students use this storytelling opportunity to practice their sentence construction. Overall, using blackout poetry to teach or enforce sentence structure allows students to have fun in a creative, storytelling assignment, while also improving their English skills. After students complete their assignment, they can have fun showing off their stories and discussing whether their sentences follow a proper sentence structure. Blackout poetry is something that any student can do at home—using newspaper clippings, old textbooks, or any scrap of writing that they find. Participating in blackout poetry will hopefully inspire an interest in storytelling and creative writing in students and encourage them to have fun while practicing English.