Fanfiction a teaching tool?

While reading an article for grad class this week I came across something that interested me a lot. I don't know why it didn't dawn on me to begin with, but fanfiction can be used a tool to improve ELL student's written language skills. I mean, of course it can, and teachers use it all the time in literacy classes to engage students in a task that hones skills that might otherwise seem mundane for the student. So I changed my Google Alerts, tweaked some of the ones I already had, and added some new ones.

There was no brand new articles or websites about using fanfiction to teach language learners, but there was a few archived sites that I visited after making the alert. One in particular was a presentation hosted on Slide Share that explored a few fan fiction tasks that were employed in an ESL classroom.

The activities were all done online and collaboratively. The presentation talks about the informal learning that takes place in the online communities and alludes to the fact that these activities harness that potential. It goes on to state that learners engaged in writing fanfiction progress from novice to successful writers of English. Sometimes, the learners even learn and words/phrases that are not as common in today's language (useful if they read some classics).

When the learners engage in the writing task they have to employee many different writing and grammar and skills that they might not willingly explore on their own. One very interesting fact I read was that each cohort created works that were up to 16,000 words, that's a lot of language building.

I love the idea of using fanfiction to teach literacy, especially in older grades. If the task is completed digitally it can be collaborative to allow for peer review and tutoring. It's an authentic task as the learner is engaged in creating actual language and exploring and acquiring cultural knowledge. The students are given choice, to write about something they care about (often a video game, anime, movie, novel series, etc.) which makes this a highly engaging task. Again, they are engaged with other learners that also love the same topic, so there will hopefully be a lot of discussion and learning from each other. If the task is created properly, fanfiction offers a potential for rich learning experiences for language learners.

Fan Fiction Tasks in the ESL Classroom