Book club and creative writing workshop in the ESL university classroom

Alicia Muro; Mar Asensio Aróstegui

doi:10.31637/epsir-2024-830

Authors

Alicia Muro University of La Rioja https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8274-3294
Mar Asensio Aróstegui University of La Rioja https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4340-9055

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.31637/epsir-2024-830

Keywords:

book club, creative writing, language centre, higher education, ESL, short story, critical thinking, learning motivation

Abstract

Introduction: La Casa de las Lenguas, a language centre at the University of La Rioja (Spain), offers the course “Let’s Read” designed as a book club that allows students to read and discuss short stories in English by authors from different countries and periods. Creative writing workshops are used alongside a more conventional approach to literature in the university course “Contemporary Narrative in English.” Methodology: This article aims to use the experience gained from teaching these courses to propose a combination of an English language book club with a creative writing workshop in the ESL university classroom. This university teaching experience is designed both to enhance language proficiency in English and to foster creativity and critical thinking. Results: Sessions are designed to work on the skills of listening, speaking, reading, and writing in English. Activities include an introduction to the author and their socio-cultural context, the reading/listening of the selected text, reading comprehension exercises, guided discussions, and creative writing tasks. Discussion and conclusions: The experience gained suggests that the benefits of this proposal include students’ improvement in language skills, greater motivation to learn a foreign language and engage in its culture, and the cultivation of creativity and critical thinking.

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Author Biographies

Alicia Muro, University of La Rioja

Alicia Muro holds a PhD from the University of La Rioja (Spain), where she graduated in English studies and studied her MA in advanced studies in humanities. She has been Visitor Scholar in the University of Galway and in Trinity College Dublin (Ireland). She is working on the figure of the unreliable narrator in contemporary Irish literature, with especial interest in its relationship to trauma, memory, and guilt. She has also published articles on gender and identity in Iris Murdoch’s The Black Prince, identity and masculinities in film, war and trauma in Ian McEwan’s Atonement, or gender, trauma, and shame in Sally Rooney. Her Doctoral Thesis won the Inés Praga Award in 2022 for the best thesis in Irish Studies.

Mar Asensio Aróstegui, University of La Rioja

Mar Asensio Aróstegui is Senior lecturer at the University of La Rioja (Spain). She graduated in English Studies at the University of Zaragoza (Spain), completed an MA in Studies in Fiction at the University of East Anglia (United Kingdom) with a research grant from La Caixa and The British Council and obtained her PhD at the University of Zaragoza (Spain). Her fields of research include narratology, identity, gender studies in literature and film, and creative writing. She has published academic articles and book chapters on the works of Jeanette Winterson, Doris Lessing, Evelyn Waugh, Wyndham Lewis, Don DeLillo, John Banville, Ridley Scott, Peter Weir, Woody Allen and Steven Spielberg. She edited the Journal of English Studies from 2006 to 2009.

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