Exploring teachers\u27 practices of teaching creative writing skills in an early childhood development (ECD) classroom in a community school: A case study

This study explores how a teacher in an English language classroom of Early Childhood Development section (ECD-IV) teaches young children\u27s creative writing skills. Using a qualitative case study method, the research was conducted in a community school in Karachi, Pakistan. In this study, the primary research participants were one ECD- IV language teacher and four young children aged between seven to eight years. The data was generated through semi-structured interviews, classroom observations and the document analysis. The major findings reveal that although the language teacher (LT) provides opportunities to the young children to practice creative writing, the children do not explicitly express their creative thoughts and ideas while writing creatively. During the study, the six lessons that I observed, informed me that once in a week, the LT provides a topic to the children for doing creative writing. Most of the time, the children are expected to complete the given story, which indicates that the teacher only expects the product in one lesson from the children and ignores the process of writing. In addition, it is also evident from the data that the LT has an ambiguous perception about the writing process. Rather, she mixes it up with the steps she follows to introduce creative writing. Moreover, the teaching pattern exhibits similarity in the lesson delivery of the teacher. The LT introduces the topic through a detailed or lengthy discussion, after which she asks children to write some sentences to complete the task. During lesson presentations, it was observed that teacher\u27s interactions with the children are most of the time bilingual or sometimes translation from English to Urdu, where as children completely used Urdu language in interacting with their peers and teacher. Hence, when it comes to writing, they experience difficulty in expressing their thoughts in English language. Findings also inform that the LT checks creative writing only for the assessment purpose, as she checks the grammar, spellings and hand writing of the children. This creates ambiguity between the concept of nurturing creativity and the convention of language, which consequently increase young children\u27s struggle to write creatively. Eventually, the whole picture of findings project that there is a dire need to bring improvement in the practice of teaching and learning of creative writing in the ECD classroom. Therefore, the study ends with some recommendations offered for the purpose of improvement