The Effects of Creative Writing Practices on the Writing Skills of Students Learning Turkish as a Second Language

Purpose: The purpose of this research is to understand how creative writing practices affect the written expression skills of B2 level students. Method: In this study, a pretest-posttest control group semi-experimental model was used. While creative writing practices were implemented in the experiment group, instruction in alignment with the Teacher Guide of Yunus Emre Institution was provided in the control group. The study was conducted with 49 students at the B2 level at the Aksaray University Turkish Learning Application and Research Center during the 2018-2019 academic year. Written expression works (composition), writing self-efficacy, and writing anxiety scales were used as data collection instruments. Written expression works were evaluated according to the Creative Writing Evaluation Scale. Dependent and independent t-tests were conducted for pairwise comparisons. Findings: The means for post-test scores in the experiment group for the scales except for the writing anxiety scale were higher than the means of post-test scores in the control group. This indicates that creative writing practices in comparison with the traditional methods are an important factor in improving the written expression skills of students who learn Turkish as a second language. (C) 2019 Ani Publishing Ltd. All rights reserved