The Influence of The Content and Format of Textbooks on Learners’ Creative Literary Writing
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Abstract
The study aimed at finding the effect(s) of two types of learning materials on children’s literary creativity: A Persian primary textbook and the supplementary material given to the students during their New-Year holiday as their homework. The former is a classic textbook with some texts ( both literary and non-literary) followed by exercises as well as some illustrations, while the latter, in appearance, looks like a story book, including lots of poems, stories and illustrations as well as some non-literary material. The sections comprised the corpus of the study should aimed at teaching writing (with regards to grammar, diction, etc.) The participants of the study were 30 primary school students. They were given two types of questions, chosen from both texts, designed for testing learners’ writing ability. It was to find out which would promote students’ creative writing more-- the conversational questions or non-conversational ones. In particular, it sought to see if the type of questions would affect their creativity in writing. The students’ writing was evaluated considering the following criteria: point of view, adjective, figurative speech, narrating, and personification. Based on the findings of the study, the researchers gave some suggestions for making textbooks more interesting and user friendly.
Key words: Literary creativity, writing, primary school textbook, supplementary material
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