Motivation in Creative Writing

This paper aims to investigate to what extent creative writing promotes motivation for EFL learners to write. A report published by the National Assessment Project (NAFS) commissioned by The Swedish National Agency for Education evaluated the national tests in English for Swedish students during 2018/2019, documenting that the Swedish students obtained the lowest English scores on writing. This result corresponds with the national test scores in English from earlier years. According to The Swedish National Agency for Education (Skolverket, 2019) motivation is a necessary component for L2 learning, and teachers are expected to play a fundamental role in creating student motivation. However, research within the area of motivation indicates that the understanding of motivation in L2 learning is limited. Likewise, the research indicates a need for the understanding of motivation to be both revised and subject to further research, both to understand the nature of motivation and to define tools on how to push motivation in L2 writing. One such tool could be creative writing (CW). Thus, to understand to what extent CW can motivate EFL learners to write, we explore recent studies that examine how different implementations of CW activities and CW courses can motivate students to write within a school context. In the study, we argue that CW motivates EFL learners to produce text. CW seems to facilitate relevance for the student and empower writing activities that consider the student’s self-interest as well as bring new life to the student’s understanding of writing. The insights of this study hold pedagogical values for L2 writing in the EFL classroom