The third group writing activity

As with the previous activity, the aim of the third writing activity was for the students to write a story beginning with an opening sentence. Each group was given a piece of paper with an

opening sentence to a story. The students’ task was to continue the story by adding two new sentences to the story and passing it on to the next group, who also had to add two sentences and pass it on again. The groups were given different sentences. The first group’s opening sentence was As soon as she walked in, she felt the tension, the second group’s opening sentence was Someone must have seen him, because the police were at his door, and the third group’s opening sentence was As I looked out of the window, I saw something strange. As with the previous activity, the students spent two lessons on writing the stories.

The students started with the task quickly and knew what to do, but spent some time wondering what to write. The researcher noticed that there was a big discussion in each group concerning how to link the opening sentence with the story they wanted to write. Some of the issues of discussion were the point of view and main character(s). However, it took some time before they started to write. The first sentence was written after circa ten minutes of debating.

It was clear that this type of writing activity was exciting for the students. They showed great enthusiasm for writing their stories. However, it was problematic making sure that the students were finished at the same time when passing on their stories to the other groups. Some of the groups had to wait for the other students to finish in order to continue the story. Nevertheless, all of the students got the opportunity to see what the others had written.

This was also time-consuming, as the groups first had to read what was given to them and then write their part of the story. It sometimes took time to understand what the previous group had written. On the other hand, the students did not seem to mind reading and writing at the same time. From what the researcher observed, they enjoyed the process of both reading and writing.

Two of the students wanted to switch groups prior to this group writing activity. This was because they felt they did not work well in their groups and thought it would be more interesting if they were put in a different group. The teacher rejected their suggestion because the plan of keeping the same groups was to see how the students worked together during all of the writing activities.

It was also interesting to observe how the groups worked on writing their part of the story. Writing only two sentences before passing the text on was a challenge for some students. The struggle for them was to restrain themselves from writing more than two sentences. There was also a challenge of deciding what to write when there were so many ideas about the story. The researcher noticed that the groups had to take turns on who should write what, and which idea they should use first.

When they continued their stories in the second lesson, the students needed some time to read what had been written of the stories so far. Each group was given the first text they had started with, and the writing of the stories continued smoothly. The writing process went faster in the second lesson compared to the first.

At the end of the second lesson, the students had finished writing their stories and were allowed to read them aloud to the other students. This time the reading of the stories was different because the students had participated in the writing of all the stories. Even though the students knew all three stories, they were thrilled about reading aloud the stories for the others. Each group had to read the text they had started with in the first lesson. The students enjoyed reading the stories, which ended up being weird and funny.

There were also some differences in the length of the texts in this writing activity, as with the previous ones. As this activity required the students to pass their stories on, it was not easy to tell the contributions of each group. However, all of the texts were relatively long: one of the stories was more than one and a half pages and the two others were two pages. This meant that these were the longest texts the students had written so far.

The texts were different to the previous ones regarding the content and structure.

Firstly, there was much more use of direct speech in these stories. For example: Why didn’t you answere me when we nocked on the door? the police said. Other examples were It is only mine!, We will not leave the house and Do you want to danse with me? The students had also capitalized some of the letters to express an exclamation or an order.

In addition, the students had used the first person and third person point of view in all of the stories. They had used the point of view given in the opening sentence in all of the stories. An interesting similarity between the stories was the use of describing actions instead of circumstances of characters. This was also a change from the previous stories. It seemed as if the students were more concerned with explaining what was happening in the story rather than giving an illustration or description of the place or people. Every story started

immediately with an action after the opening sentence. The first story continued with: She saw a man with a beautiful smile. He standed on her right side, it was prince David. The second story continued with: The police knocked on the door a few times. After not getting an answer they broke down the door’ and the third story with: There was a man.. he had a chicken nugget.