Creative Activities to Teach Writing Efficiently in Senegalese EFL Classrooms

ABSTRACT:It is no use proclaiming Senegalese students’ poor writing performance in English from therooftops. As a critical productive skill, most students relegate writing to a position of secondaryimportance. There is a significant discrepancy between understanding the topic and producing a correct sentencefrom spelling and grammar mistakes to vocabulary deficiency. During class tests, in exams, etc., the copy-andpaste phenomenon is increasingly becoming the substitute for reflection and personal production. However,students alone must not be the sole scapegoats of this school poor performance of which they are already thevictims. Senegalese English as a foreign language (EFL) teachers ought to be creative enough to be able to teachwriting efficiently. With a total of 60 participants selected as research samples from different schools, this paperexplores the reasons why students underperform in writing and probes EFL teachers’ proposed writing activitiesin their classrooms. I have used questionnaires for both quantitative and qualitative data collection methods toverify the hypotheses. The findings of this research have revealed that students severely underachieve in writingas an activity. In a constructive prospect, I have suggested a creative writing activity and sound sources that canremedy this underperformance in the discussion section.

Keywords: writing in EFL, writing performance, school failure, creative writing activities, Senegalese EFLclassrooms.