The Use of Biyu in Students' Creative Writing: A Study on an Intervention Program

The Use of Biyu in Students' Creative Writing: A Study on an Intervention Program

This paper reports on an exploratory study on the use of Biyu (a compound word for analogy, metaphor and simile) in fostering creative writing. In this study, 174 students (age range: 15 to 17 years) learned Biyu for a period of two months. The learning of Biyu was included into the pre-university curricula, as a means to enhance students' thinking and creativity. An intervention program was designed to explicitly encourage the participants to use Biyu in writing composition. Nearly half of the participants attended the intervention program. The other participants attended regular Chinese writing classes. In general, the participants' performances in writing compositions improved after learning Biyu in the regular and intervention classes. The participants who had ample knowledge of Biyu showed signify-cant improvement on their scores in areas: creativity, novelty, imagination, and grammar. The participants who had an average or a minimal level knowledge of Biyu did not improve in the above-mentioned areas as significantly as their counterparts who had ample knowledge of Biyu. Discussion was focused on how school curricula can allow Biyu and other learning activities to be introduced to regular lessons to facilitate creativity fostering environments for Chinese language learning in general, and Chinese writing in particular.