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“The best-laid plans of mice and men”

Impacts of an authentic novel on high school EAL students’ creative writing

ORCiD logo with link | Curtin University
Published online: 13 November 2025
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/aral.25075.ngu
Abstract
An ambitious way to teach narrative skills to students speaking English as an additional language (EAL) is the use of authentic literary texts, which contain complex ideas, unfamiliar cultural references and metaphorical language that deviates from standard linguistic norms (Ziadi, A. (2025). The aesthetic judgements of metaphors in understanding literary texts. Humanities & Social Sciences Communications, 12(1), 190–11. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar). This study explored the impacts of authentic novella Of Mice and Men (Steinbeck, J. (1937). Of mice and men. Penguin Books.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar) on 14 year ten EAL students’ creative writing skills. After the students had been taught the novella for four weeks, they were asked to create a new ending for the story, employing Steinbeck’s style and tone. NVivo analyses of the students’ submissions indicated that all of them were able to incorporate narrative elements and imagery from the authentic text into their narratives while also inventing their own literary devices to make their stories more emotionally engaging. Two most noticeable benefits the students appeared to gain from the study of Of Mice and Men were the ‘show, don’t tell’ technique and cultural references such as ‘Garden of Eden’ and ‘Curse of Cain.’ The findings of the study suggested that carefully selected authentic literary texts can offer a quality scaffold of narrative components, useful linguistic modelling and invaluable cultural insights, helping to accelerate EAL students’ language acquisition.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Literature review
    • 2.1Usefulness of authentic literary texts compared to traditional materials
    • 2.2Pedagogical challenges when using authentic literary texts in the language classroom
  • 3.Methodology
    • 3.1Participants
    • 3.2Authentic novella selected for the class — Of Mice and Men (Steinbeck, 1937)
    • 3.3Data collection: A written task
    • 3.4Data analysis
  • 4.Findings
    • 4.1RQ1: To what extent were the students able to incorporate the narrative features learned from the authentic novella into their stories?
      • 4.1.1Description of the setting
      • 4.1.2Description of George and Lennie
    • 4.2RQ2: To what extent were the students able to demonstrate creativity in their narratives?
    • 4.3RQ3: Was there a statistically significant correlation between the students’ English proficiency and the number of learnt features and creative features used in their writing?
  • 5.Discussion
  • 6.Limitations and conclusion
  • Declaration
  • Note
  • References
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