Part II

As mentioned in our podcast, engaging creatively with fictional texts lies at the heart of Fiction and Content Unified Learning. Everyone of us had to deal with tasks like the following in our own school days. If you teach a language beside a content subject, you will for sure have assigned them to our students.
These are creative tasks encouraging students to write texts about texts — commonly known in literary education as “production-orientation”.Be it from a student‘s or a teacher‘s perspective, you might have asked yourself on the basis of which criteria to assess the results of dealing with such creative writing tasks.

First, literary education and content learning via fiction should connect creativity and interpretation by using “creative responses” as a helpful tool for students. Instead of just being an end goal, these responses should help students develop their storytelling skills and allow them to obtain content competency such as scientific literacy. Second, we need to create a solid foundation to improve how we design tasks that focus on production, like writing assignments. Often, these tasks can feel random or unclear. By establishing clear criteria, teachers can better create and assess these tasks, ensuring they align with specific teaching goals.

The entry point for creative engagement with fictional texts lies in their inherent gappiness. Ingarden basically distinguishes between empty spots that can be filled based on information contained in the text and empty spots which can be filled at the reader’s discretion.

In the first case, the text contains yardsticks for the reader to decide which of their fillings are compatible with the text‘s intention and which are not. 
The second class of indeterminacy, that is empty spots, allows the reader a wider margin of freedom filling the empty spots. The reader may pursue their creative impetus largely unhindered by the semantic givens of the source. This is due to the absence of yardsticks for the reader to sense how the text want them to fill the gaps.

Ingarden admits that readers might do more than just fill in the blanks the way the text intends. Readers can be creative in areas where the text is unclear or doesn’t provide specific details. Furthermore, readers can even go against what the text clearly states. They might add their own ideas that don’t match or even contradict what’s actually written in the text. In essence, this means readers have the power to interpret and imagine beyond what the author explicitly wrote, sometimes even ignoring or changing parts of the original text in their minds.

We can identify three ways readers interact with unclear or open-ended parts of a story: Readers add details that fit with the story’s main idea (complementing). Changing the story: Readers interpret the story in a way that alters its original meaning (distorting). Disagreeing with the story: Readers create a version that goes against the original story’s message (disclaiming). When teachers create writing tasks based on a story, they need to decide which of these three approaches they want students to use.
For the first type (complementing), the story gives clear boundaries, and readers can add details that fit within those limits.  In language classes, this can lead to activities where students expand the story in ways that match its original intention. The second and third approaches (changing the story and disagreeing with it) are similar to what some educators call writing ‘alternative texts’ or ‘counter-texts’. These are new versions that either alter or challenge the original story.

The main thing these writing tasks have in common is how much freedom they give you to interpret the original text’s meaning. Besides truly creative tasks that let you fill in gaps in the original text, there are also tasks that focus on understanding and analyzing. These include summarizing (précising/reproduction), breaking down the text (analyzing), and judging its quality (evaluating). Suchlike tasks may also be clad in a creative format. The worksheet enclosed will give you examples of all the task types mentioned.