AND THEY WROTE HAPPILY EVER AFTER: FAIRY TALES IN ENGLISH LANGUAGE WRITING CLASSES

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AND THEY WROTE HAPPILY EVER AFTER: FAIRY TALES IN ENGLISH LANGUAGE WRITING LASSES

The article reports on a descriptive study with a group of English Language and Literature freshman students in a Turkish university. The study examined the effects of composing fairy tales on learners’ attitude towards writing classes. An attitudinal questionnaire displayed that some students did not like writing in English earlier but integrating fairy tales to writing courses brought about a substantial difference in their opinions and practice of writing. It can therefore be proposed that English language teachers modify their traditional frame to a novel one incorporating fairy tales in teaching writing to have their students benefit from the writing practice more.

Writing skill may be labelled as intricate by an English as a Foreign Language (EFL) student. It is not far from fact when Nunan (1999: 271) says to compose “a coherent, fluent, extended piece of writing” in one’s second language is achallenging job. Moreover, the writing skill has been developed both in “breadth and depth” (Silva and Brice, 2004: 1). On  of the major goals for writing teachers should therefore be making students believe in the efficiency of written communication with focus on content rather than on form (Harmer, 2001). However, EFL teachers may insist on having their students compose routine expository paragraphs and essays. While the importance of such practices cannot be ignored, ‘repetitive assignments’ might result in ‘boring’ classes. As a result of these repetitive practices, students might havea false self-confidence about their writing ability as if there is no need for writing or learning to write anymore. In direct contradiction, there is also a different type of students who feel a kind of writing apprehension as they do not believe in their writing ability. Such students tend to display high degrees of anxiety which affect their attitudes and writing abilities (Faigley, Daly and Witte 1981). In such a dilemma literature may provide a positive assistance for writing classes in terms of grammar, vocabulary, and as a whole language (McKay, 2000). Moreover, as Chen (2006) puts forth literature offers very different “but natural language communications to students” (p. 212), thus, students become motivated to negotiate and write. Fairy tales (FT) particularly might be an alternative to give variety and boast learners’ writing attitude. In order to compose a fairy tale, a novel approach is required. Badger and White (2000: 157) believe that one of the effective ways to teach writing is to “incorporate the insights of product, process, and genre approaches”. They propose that the genre model displays the language which is applied in specific situations, and for a good product, a process approach is required. Therefore, they introduce the process genre approach. Such an approach may aid students in learning both the specific language and the different steps of composing a fairy tale. Writing FT follows a typical structure. Everybody knows that there may be a castle or forest, monster or witch, prince or princess and so forth. In spite

of all these invertible features, writing FT allows for a wider degree of creativity (Bruti, 1999). Fairy

tales also help students to jog to their childhood memories (Chiarantano, 2005), reducing the affective filter. As a whole, students 

1) employ their previous knowledge gained in reading tales in their native language and use it in learning English, 

2) are provided with meaningful context, 

3) make use of the advantage of cooperative

learning, 

4) reduce their anxiety,

5) transmit values of different cultures, and 

6) have fun while a fairy tale is employed in EFL classrooms (IskenderogluGuglielmino, 2006). With such promising features fairy tales might add variety and joy to writing courses in EFL contexts.

The present study therefore investigates how writing a fairy tale might be appropriate to modify students’ attitude towards writing classes. Specifically, this study addresses the following research questions: 

a) In general, what is the students’ perception  towards the writing classes?

b) How does writing a fairy tale affect the  students’ receptivity towards the writing

 classes?

The results of the study show that there were students having a negative perception towards writing. Thus the course instructor attempted to get the interest of this group of students via application of fairy tales in writing classes. This study tried to display how effective writing fairy tales could be on the way to bring variety and quality to writing instruction. The statistical and qualitative data presented here depict that theemp loyment of FT in writing class has advantages. As a whole, writing FT assists students to broaden their creativity, imagination, and self-confidence since the students find working on a new activity very interesting and enjoyable. This modification brings motivation and appreciation to the class. In the light of the above findings, it could be recommended that EFL teachers break the traditional rules of writing activities and try the novel ones. Instead of only assigning the same kinds of expository paragraphs and essays, EFL teachers can bring originality to the activities and assignments, too. While this study applied fairy tales in writing classes, this employment might be pertinent to other EFL skills as well. It might be endeavoured to apply fairy tales in teaching such other language skills as speaking, listening and writing since this study displayed that fairy tale is an applicable technique to make students appreciate their writing classes and write happily for ever. 

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