Creative Writing - Fanfiction / Activities for Writing Lesson (Vocabulary in Social Media)

Level: B1 (Intermediate Level English) language proficiency

Social Media Tool: Reddit

Reddit is a place where you can join thousands of communities and conversation with other people from all around the world.

• Students are familiar with this type of social media website.

• They can create posts, join both public and private communities, comment, and get inspired by other people.

Target Vocabulary

• Writing fictional narratives and character's point of view.

• Using some descriptive words, transition words/phrases, etc.

• Using imagination and maybe discover the future author version of yourself.

Why these vocabulary words?

Students should be able to,

• develop their own fictional narratives by using their favorite movie/TV series, animes, etc.

• read other people's ideas and fanfictions

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1. Warm-up; show students a few pictures about popular series/movies and fans of them. Then, ask them to guess the topic of this lesson and listen to their answers. Give examples from your own life (your favorite series/movies and fandoms you belong to). Next, ask students to share their favorites related to this topic.

2. Task; tell students to create a simple map that includes the title of their fanfiction, the show that based on, character names, time, and place. Then, remind them to save this map as they will create their own fanfiction according to the information they wrote down.

3. Instruct and Model; show an example fandom-crossover fanfiction (Iron Man -movies- and Harry Potter) named "What Dreams Become" from online. Analyze elements of this fanfiction in terms of characters, dialogues, narrations, setting, writing style, plot, etc. with students. Especially point out descriptive words, transition words/phrases, etc.

4. Go over the terms related to creative writing from previous lessons and make sure students remember them (e.g. plot, theme, setting, imagery, climax, metaphor, personification, protagonist, point of view, irony, etc.).

5. Independent Practice; tell students to sign up to Reddit and join the community called

6. Independent Practice; tell students to update their map if necessary and start writing minimum 500 words fanfictions. Remind them that their fanfictions should appropriate to general audiences in terms of content rating.

7. As homework, they should join the private community that the teacher created for them (e.g. CreativeWritingPlace). Then, they should publish their fanfictions as a single post and comment/peer-review each other.

Examples from Reddit;

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Incidental or Intentional Vocabulary Learning?

Intentional Learning:

• Understanding accurate version of creative writings

• Point out important expressions in the model fanfiction

• Peer review with commenting for the appropriate language usage

Incidental Learning:

• Reading other people's posts and comments from all around the world on Reddit "FanFiction" public community

• Sharing comments with other peers' fanfictions in the commenting box

Connecting Students to a Community of Fans

These activities connect students to a community of fans who can expose them to the desired vocabulary because:

• they can join the public Reddit community "FanFiction" which is a place for writers and readers to talk about and share fanfictions with more than 139k members

• after submitting the homework to a private classroom-only community

• (CreativeWritingPlace), they can get feedback, connect, and interact with other peer learners focusing on the same learning objective

• focus on language production

Learning Vocabulary in Context

1. Students become familiar with vocabularies related to creative writing and fanfictions thanks to online fandom.

2. Practice their writing skills by using appropriate vocabularies in this context.

3. They can guess the meaning of unknown vocabularies/phrases from their context.