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7.2 Insights from the content analysis
Employing the frames established in previous stages of this study, I set up three categories of the student texts that in one way or another refl ected off of the au-thors’ intention to produce original pieces. These categories were voice, role-play, and personal narrative (see also Zergollern-Miltetić & Horváth, 2009). In the following, we will see an introduction to and discussion of each of the three types, with representative examples reprinted. (The full texts can be found on the Smashwords and Feedbooks web sites.)
7.2.1 Voice
When reading a text, of whatever genre, we will hear the author speaking. De-pending on the DC targeted, as well as on the aim and the theme, among other aspects, the origin of this voice can show a great degree of variation. In the classes where I taught these students, we always tried to make an effort to experiment with a variety of styles and voices. One of the three representative qualities that research has revealed is how student writing can appear as original in terms of this auditory aspect that can be captured in creative ways of using and inventing vocabulary as well as juxtaposing seemingly irreconcilable genres and content
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elements. When done effectively, such writing enables readers to hear a real voice speaking in the text, often refl ecting on the person, one whose individuality cannot be easily mistaken for anyone else. We can see one such example below by Éliás (2012):
Should I lie? I’ll just get into a bigger mess… either way I already did enough damage to be at a cross-road. I don’t regret what I’ve done. Why should I?
I’ve done what I’ve done, I made my life a bit more diffi cult than I intended.
The phases I went through to get here, it made it all worthwhile.
In another piece, the author experiments with various forms of speaking as well as expresses the almost uncontrollable desire to shout. Describing an interest-ing topic related to beinterest-ing original, in her personal essay Váldi (in Álló & Váldi, 2012) discusses what makes people wish to be unique:
Sometimes I just want to shout ’STOP’ at everyone. I want them to stop;
stop worrying, stop complaining, stop what they are doing to not only to themselves but to those whom are around them. I know, our world became a rushing pile of ants. Everyone wants to do something.
They just want to be unique; but how do you want to be unique if you don’t even stop for a second and look around yourself? This makes me feel like I would stand on a busy airport. Everybody is rushing to catch their fl ight, or to get the last one of the most delicious donut that they have ever eaten. And I’m just standing there and looking at them.
7.2.2 Role play
The content analysis of the scripts has brought to the surface a second group made up of writings whose authors designed one or multiple roles and these fi ctional narratives, often fi rst-person, invite the reader to explore the inner thoughts and streams of consciousness of one or more characters. Several such texts can be found in the e-book corpus. The most noteworthy is probably the series of stories told from four perspectives in the e-book Splintering, the longest e-book, by Auth, Cser, Csüdör and Renczes (2013). The four students tell the incident in question in the form of diary entries. One representative sample of this work reads as follows:
I had a blackout... again. I can’t take this anymore. When I realized, I was lying on the cold ground, in the garden of my house. I got up and I felt wet and then I went inside, had a hot shower and had a snack. I’m inside now.
I’m trying to call my memories back but it’s not working, don’t bother. I have better things to do. My phone is ringing. My assistant just said that I’m late from work. Come on Jess, hurry up! (Renczes, 2013)
JÓZSEF HORVÁTH
7.2.3 Personal narrative
The third group of mostly non-fi ction texts is made up of stories that appear to be based on a fresh way of looking at a personal experience. This is probably the hardest feat to achieve as part of a university course as authors may have second thoughts about just how personal they can or wish to be in such narratives. In terms of the specifi c demands that such framing sets on the authors, or rather, what they set on themselves, we can see that although this type can be regarded as the hard-est, it also seems to be the most exciting to produce and enjoy. The reason is that when a personal memory becomes the core of a non-fi ction text, where we can hear a narrator who is the main character of the story, we have an opportunity to really appreciate the willingness of the author to share an original piece of writing where this decision to provide a narrative from a distinct and concrete point of view be-comes a meaningful challenge to both writer and reader. Over the years, I have had the pleasure of appreciating many such texts, but probably the most original of all is the one written by Takács in the Take Off collection (2010). Here is a paragraph from the middle of the essay. (See the full text reprinted at the end in the Appendix.)
All this happened in June 2006, and The World Cup was in full swing – too bad it had always left me cold. The song Come on England was blaring from every shop and every pub. Had I been a fan, I would have bought an Eng-land Home or an EngEng-land Away World Cup shirt. But I was only window-shopping, with CCTV cameras following my steps wherever I went: I was watched in the shopping mall, on the alley, even on a path in the park.
It is with pieces like this that one may feel justifi ed in stating that a mere sample does not do justice to the effort that went into the writing and the resulting high quality of the text: one really needs to have access to the full work to ap-preciate the way the author manages to make sense of an important, memorable personal experience, narrate it in a foreign language with a style that is distinctly his, and in so doing also be able to elevate the text to a level where the reader can identify the abstract notions in the description of concrete events and the author’s refl ections on them.
8 Conclusion
This paper has presented further evidence that in EFL writing skills development we have an opportunity to assist students become more autonomous in the way they manage their work so that they can discover both the origins of their ideas and the originality of those ideas. There is no doubt at all that such an approach can work in many different educational contexts and tasks. The results of the study in-dicate that originality is a quality of student writing that is worth encouraging and
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developing, even though it is clear that what is original in terms of text organiza-tion and topic treatment, for example, does not necessarily guarantee high-quality language use. In reading and re-reading the e-books, we can identify varying lev-els in students’ skills of text organization, focus, punctuation, diction, and syntax.
What appears as original cannot always be regarded as good or good enough. One of the limitations of the study is the complete disregard of mistakes and errors in the texts. For the purposes at hand, their analysis did not seem to be as relevant as the positive features of the collections of these student essays and stories. How-ever, as these are electronic publications, there is a chance that students will come back to their work and add the fi nal revision and editing touch that is not always in evidence in some of the scripts.
What is certainly a future step to take is the further analysis of these essays and stories as well as the continued use of them as reading materials in forthcoming courses, so that the process approach can be extended across semesters and groups.
REFERENCES
Álló, P. & Váldi, E. (2012). Two worlds and us. feedbooks.com/userbook/26532/two-worlds-and-us Auth, R., Cser, L., Csüdör, E., & Renczes, M. (2013). Splintering. feedbooks.com/userbook/30927/
splintering
Éliás, Z. (2012). The immortal mobile enemy. Ed. by R. Nagy. feedbooks.com/userbook/26413/the-immortal-mobile-enemy
Farkas, M. (2012). Being an average girl. Ed. by B. Pálfy. feedbooks.com/userbook/26537/being-an-average-girl
Flower, L. & Hayes, J. (1981). A cognitive process theory of writing. College Composition &
Communication, 32, 365-387.
Godwin-Jones, R. (2003). Blogs and wikis: Environments for on-line collaboration. Language Learning & Technology, 7 (2), 12-16.
Granger, S. (Ed.). (1998). Learner English on computer. London: Longman.
Horváth, J. (2001). Advanced writing in English as a foreign language: A corpus-based study of processes and products. Pécs: Lingua Franca Csoport.
Horváth, J. (2010). (Ed.). Take off: Creative writing by Hungarian students. smashwords.com/
books/view/12916
Horváth, J. (Ed.). (2011). I can’t be 16 again: A collection of Hungarian university students’ essays and stories. feedbooks.com/userbook/22886/i-can-t-be-16-again
Horváth, J. (2012). Writing, editing and publishing ebooks in university EFL education. In B.
Horváthová et al. (Eds.), New directions in teaching foreign languages (pp. 49-60). Brno:
Masaryk University, Faculty of Education.
Horváth, J. & Zergollern-Miltetić, L. (2013). “For someone whose fi rst language is not English, everything seems original: Originality and Hungarian and Croatian students’ writing in English.
In J. Mihaljević Djigunović, J. & M. Medved Krajnović (Eds.), UZRT 2012: Empirical studies in English applied linguistics (pp. 142-154). Zagreb: FF Press.
Hyland, K. (2002). Teaching and researching writing. Harlow: Pearson Education Limited.
Matáncsi, I. & Horváth, P. (2013). Distorted minds. feedbooks.com/userbook/30933/distorted-minds Molnár, L. & Pfi tzner, A. (2012). On earth. feedbooks.com/userbook/26540/on-earth
Pecorari, D. (2003). Good and original: Plagiarism and patchwriting in academic second-language writing. Journal of Second Language Writing, 12, 317-345.
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Radó, A. & Karádi, G. (2013). Signs. feedbooks.com/userbook/30929/signs
Silva, T. (1993). Towards an understanding of the distinct nature of L2 writing: The ESL research and its implications. TESOL Quarterly, 27, 665-677.
Zelja. (2011). We are all alike. feedbooks.com/userbook/23734/we-are-all-alike
Zergollern-Miltetić, L. & Horváth, J. (2009). Coherence and originality in university students’ writing in EFL: The Zagreb–Pécs project. In R. Lugossy, J. Horváth & M. Nikolov (Eds.), UPRT 2008:
Empirical studies in English applied linguistics (pp. 135-151). Pécs: Lingua Franca Csoport.
Zinsser, W. (1999). On writing well. New York: Harper.
APPENDIX
Still There by Dániel Takács
I could hardly lug my suitcase by the time I arrived in Cambridge. A stranger shoved it into the overhead compartment on the train.
Another series of dragging and I arrived at the house. When I reached the landing at the top of the staircase and looked left, heartache washed over me:
The glass of water she had drunk from four days before still lingered on the shelf above her bed, half-empty; but she was elsewhere, 1200 miles away. I went down-stairs to the kitchen, where I found the spaghetti we had left in a saucepan still on the counter – but moldy.
Ten minutes’ walk away from the half-empty glass and the moldy spaghetti loomed the residential home for the homeless. Its door had a combination lock (the residents could have lost their keys while hammered or stoned). When I en-tered, I smelled a mixture of stale air, the stench of stir-fry, and all sorts of other fries. Years of baking and frying had blackened the oven on the inside, and the deposit of pies had made the baking sheets greasy. On my single try to bake a ready-to-bake steak and kidney pie, the smoke billowing out of the oven set off the fi re alarm – a resident silenced it with the end of a broomstick.
All this happened in June 2006, and The World Cup was in full swing – too bad it had always left me cold. The song Come on England was blaring from every shop and every pub. Had I been a fan, I would have bought an England Home or an England Away World Cup shirt. But I was only window-shopping, with CCTV cameras following my steps wherever I went: I was watched in the shopping mall, on the alley, even on a path in the park.
However, I was watching, too: TV. After a few doses of BBC, Channel 4, and ITV, I learned that most daytime TV programs covered interior design: how to do up your home quick and cheap. The host dropped in on a lady and brought along Mr. Fixit – and surprise, surprise, the viewers witnessed stunning makeovers in seconds.
The rest of the programs were talk shows – one about a pre-teen boy who had been drinking booze, smoking pot, and terrorizing his mother for the previous
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couple of years. There, in the studio, his mother lost it and started sobbing when he called her a whore.
I left the TV to take a walk. Roaming down a street, I stared into basement kitchens. Farther down, as I was meandering through Jesus Green, I glared at the heaps of garbage from previous night’s picnics propped to garbage cans, thrown-away sausages and chicken breasts on disposable grill pans, and empty Carlsberg beer cans scattered on the lawn.
After passing the bollards and entering the car-free zone, I heard a drunk yell-ing at his invisible mate. On the next street, two hotties strolled into one of the posh restaurants past a bum lying at the entrance.
Terraced houses had looked awesome in Project English. In reality, they looked drab. The bare grey brick walls were dotted only by black bin liners bulg-ing with trash.
I’m still walking there.
JÓZSEF HORVÁTH