Here is a collaborative story that one of my private students, Lazaros Vasiliou wrote with me in a one-to -one lesson. It was a creative attempt to make sense of unrelated lists of vocabulary items.
The main objective has been to help him memorise the words, but the process and result goes much deeper than that. My student is fifteen years old and, it may seem that this story can’t have been written by a second language learner, but it is a collaborative attempt to instill the required learning, whilst developing creativity and deeper lexical acquisition at the same time.
Wherever I helped to move the story along was deliberate and focused, with a learning objective behind each sentence spontaneously created.
The main aim is NOT so much to produce a creative story as memorise words to pass an exam, but the story emerges from making sense of the words and making connections from lexical, grammatical, cultural, stylistc and multi-sensory perpectives.
The topic and events are almost 100% my students ideas, except at points where I elicited
solutions if he was stuck, so I used a lot of questioning to lead his thinking.
The images used are based on the story line and the best open source pictures I could find, thanks to Freedigital photos.net