Teaching figures of speech as a productive skill and its influence on EFL learners' creative writing
Abstract
Richards (2015) states that receptive competence is far more developed in all language users than productive competence and that in L2 learning, new lexis first shows as passive knowledge and later as active or productive competence. Moreover, productive competence is not a natural corollary to receptive competence; rather, the former requires noticing and focused output. The current study concerns itself with the focused output or the ability of the learners to produce comprehensible language post-intervention, which is essential for learners to acquire a new language. The study is conducted with 42 EFL learners at King Khalid University, Saudi Arabia, twenty of whom are taught Figures of Speech as a receptive skill while the remaining twenty-two are taught the Figures of Speech through three stages, designed to lead them into giving focused output or use the Figures of Speech productively in creative writing. The post-test results show that learners who are taught Figures of Speech as receptive skill could not write creatively, whereas the learners who are taught these as productive skill successfully apply the Figures of Speech to compose fine and new pieces of literature which exhibit moderate to a good grasp of creative writing. The study concludes that learners show a positive attitude and preference towards enhancing creativity by adopting such new and effective teaching methods. Accordingly, the study highly recommends adopting teaching Figures of Speech as a productive skill, in place of the commonly practiced method as a receptive skill to EFL learners.
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