Writing a Love Letter

Seminar paper from the year 2010 in the subject Didactics for the subject English - Pedagogy, Literature Studies, grade: 15, Justus-Liebig-University Giessen (Anglistik), course: Seminar: Writing in the English Foreign Language Classroom, language: English, abstract: Every once in a while people fall in love. Unfortunately, there are many cases in which they do not admit their feelings to the woman or man they lost their heart to. People often are inhibited and cautious when it comes to express affection to the woman or man of choice. Sometimes they even let their chance slip, because they are afraid of embarrassment and negative feedback from the one they adore. An adequate alternative to a face-to-face confession is the love letter. Writing a love letter is a meaningful art and it offers a great possibility to reveal one's affection for the receiver without evoking shameful situations and awkward moments that may hurt one's own feelings. By writing creatively, using the right selection of words and good argumentation, a love letter can be more than just a declaration of love. They often relinquish a moment of mystery, excitement and surprise and many people keep them lifelong as their secret treasures. In fact, writing good love letters is a demanding task even for advanced students. It might take hours of practice, drafting and rewriting to create an emotional and inspirational love letter. This paper will be about teaching intermediate students in the English foreign language (EFL) classroom, how to write a love letter. It functions as a guide for teachers to help them structuring and planning their lessons on this topic. Furthermore, it provides adequate teaching methods and innovative ideas to effectively instruct students on their way to become successful love-letter writers. The paper will commence by introducing several pre-writing activities, which serve to prepare students before they get started with the major task. In addition, the stylistic devices and structural guidelines love-letter writing requires will be introduced. In the second step, the paper concentrates on love-letter writing itself. It explores the direct preparation necessary and offers useful hints concerning the teacher's role in the writing phase. Finally, this paper illustrates a number of useful post-writing activities and evaluations methods in detail.