Abstract
This paper details the development of the Extremely Short Story Competition [ESSC] for non-native users of English. The ESSC began as a 50-word writing competition, using e-mail, between students of the Literature Club Zayed University and has since been successfully adapted for delivery via a website to involve tertiary students at federal education institutions (Zayed University, UAE University & Higher Colleges of Technology) throughout the United Arab Emirates. Examples and explanation will be given of how the web-version of the ESSC is used to encourage creativity in classroom and out-of-class language learning and has also been implemented throughout the GCC (+ Yemen) and in the Far East centering on Japan.
Highlights
Instigated in the academic year 2003/04, the Extremely Short Story Competition (ESSC) development project (Hassall 2004a; Hassall & Ganesh, 2005) involves a creative writing competition which female Emirati university students have been keen to enter, a format for the creative writing of English in a secure context that the participants have clearly felt comfortable with, and a publishing potential which they have shown themselves enthusiastic to pursue
The ESSC has resulted in the compilation of a creative corpus of written English text produced by groups of World English users based around ideas and topics chosen by the students themselves, or in response to the directives of the ESSC
All the stories submitted to the ESSC 2004 were compiled into the Emiratia anthology and published inhouse at Zayed University (ZU)
Summary
Instigated in the academic year 2003/04, the Extremely Short Story Competition (ESSC) development project (Hassall 2004a; Hassall & Ganesh, 2005) involves a creative writing competition which female Emirati university students have been keen to enter, a format for the creative writing of English in a secure context that the participants have clearly felt comfortable with, and a publishing potential which they have shown themselves enthusiastic to pursue. In 1997, the New Zealand National Radio talk-show host Bryan Edwards read out a selection of 50-word submissions to a competition organized by the program, Top of the Morning These were collected into a volume entitled The Top of the Morning book of incredibly short stories (Edwards, 1997). Once more the competition was aimed at native speakers of English who, generally, became the writers and readers of the incredibly short stories This time no use was made of stories commissioned from celebrities, perhaps because it was considered that regular exposure to the radio program, by itself, would be likely to stimulate sufficient high quality contributions for a publication. In addition to commenting on the shortness of the pieces, the students provided the following titles corresponding to the stories in Figure 3: Birth, Life and Death Mistaken Meeting
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