The effects of creative writing activities on narrative text writing skills and advanced reading awareness

The purpose of the present study was to determine the effect of creative writing exercises on narrative text writing skills and advanced reading awareness. To do that one of the mixed research designs, "exploratory sequential design" was used. The quantitative part of the study, in which a pretest post-test research design was used, consisted of 66 7th grade students of a secondary school in the city center of Elazig. The participants were divided into two groups: The Experimental Group (N=35), and the Control Group (N=31). In addition, 15 participants in the Experimental Group took part in the qualitative part. The data were obtained through the Narrative Text Writing Skills Rubric, Advanced Reading Awareness Scale, and Semi-Structured Interview Guide for Creative Writing Studies. The descriptive statistics, Independent Groups t-test, dependent groups t-test, Two-Way Variance Analysis for Mixed Measurements and Wilcoxon Signed Sequences Test were used in the analysis of quantitative data. The qualitative data were analyzed with the Content Analysis. The results of the quantitative data showed that the narrative text writing skills of the Experimental Group were statistically and significantly higher the Control Group. Furthermore, it was found that the advanced reading awareness levels of the Experimental Group increased more than the Control Group; however, this increase was not statistically significant. In addition, participans stated in the interviews that their narrative text writing skills improved, they gained courage and positive attitude towards writing, they formed a reading habit, they preferred books with events, their imagination developed, they gained the power to share and express. In sum, it was concluded that creative writing activities significantly improved narrative writing skills and improved to some extent advanced reading awaraness though a statistical significane was not found.