Enhancing the motivation of students for writing by using creative writing activities

Along with listening, reading, and speaking, writing is one of the four essential skills in language education. Writing is a crucial aspect of language learning as it enables students to enhance their vocabulary, retain information, and self-monitor their progress. Additionally, if practiced successfully, the process of writing has the potential to be entertaining. If students are intrinsically motivated, they have a better chance to produce high-quality writing. One way to enhance students' creativity and writing motivation is to incorporate more creative writing activities in the writing process. Therefore, the researcher proposed a creative writing intervention to increase the writing motivation of eighth-grade students in the school setting. The aim of this study is to investigate the effects of creative writing practices on writing motivation. The intervention was designed on the socio-cultural research that puts the emphasis on the writing process, which includes setting goals, generating and organizing ideas, and reviewing and editing. The study utilized a mixed-methods research methodology to collect both quantitative and qualitative data. The quantitative data was gathered from the Writing Motivation Questionnaire (De Smedt et al., 2020) as the pre-test and the post-test for the study. Additionally, qualitative data was gathered from both semi-structured interviews and the students' creative writing products. The study revealed that creative writing activities have a positive effect on writing motivation. Students reported in the semi-structured interviews that their will to write continued after the intervention took place. Another finding was creative writing practices had a positive impact on the creativity of the writing products; however, the study revealed that regular attendance is crucial for creative writing practices to have a positive impact on the creativity of the writing products. One unexpected finding was on the students' preferred feedback type. Research findings suggest that providing students with immediate feedback is more beneficial in enhancing their learning outcomes than giving them delayed feedback. The reason why they preferred immediate feedback was due to the writing environment. The students reported instead of writing on their own, they enjoyed writing within a group of writers where they get help from both their teacher and peers. The overall results demonstrated that creative writing practices have a positive impact on both creativity and motivation. Keywords: Writing, writing motivation, creative writing, feedback, immediate feedback, delayed feedback.