Creative Writing

Course Description

How can creative writing practices help students master a foreign language? How can students overcome their fear of writing in a foreign language, unleash their imagination using a variety of media, and make progress by working within constraints? How can students develop active listening skills within the group and find joy in sharing their writing? Come try this experience, explore your creativity in French, and transform your classroom into a writing workshop.

Working methods :

To embark together on creative writing in a foreign language in order to experience the joy of this practice for oneself and its educational value in the classroom: that is the goal of this training module. You will therefore be given opportunities for personal writing based on simple prompts and a variety of inspiration sources: texts and words, as well as images, objects, music, and more… The goal is to let your writing flow freely, to bring the language to life by playing with constraints, and to draw inspiration from each participant’s texts, as sharing is at the heart of the workshop. These experimental sessions will be accompanied by reflective and pedagogical feedback on the workshop’s objectives and the approaches explored; finally, you will be guided to develop and formalize your own writing activities tailored to your audience.

Training Objectives

Language Improvement

This training course will enable the trainee to:
  • to overcome the fear of making mistakes and the difficulty of writing in a foreign language
  • to explore words in all their dimensions: phonetic, visual, semantic, and metaphorical
  • to gain a deeper understanding of the language by broadening the range of possibilities and stepping off the beaten path of academic writing
  • to improve one's fluency in writing—in the use of words—and in speaking—in the interpretation of texts
  • to discover the writer within oneself and within each participant through the joy of sharing writing

Teaching Improvement

By the end of this training, participants will have experienced and reflected on writing workshop practices; they will be equipped to subsequently lead workshops in their own classrooms. In addition to the activity developed during the module and the texts they will have written, they will leave with the following in their “toolkit”:
  • ideas for kicking off the workshop and building the group through word exchanges
  • warm-up exercises to stimulate the imagination and get you started with writing
  • techniques for expanding vocabulary and encouraging learners to explore the language in all its dimensions
  • activity guides available at different levels, for writing individually or in groups
  • ideas for varying the way texts are read aloud, whether individually or in a group
  • Examples of projects to inspire you
  • a bibliography of resources and a variety of supporting texts, with an emphasis on contemporary literature

The instructor

Sophie Regnat Ravier
Sophie Regnat Ravier, who holds an Agrégation in Classical Literature and a master’s degree in the Pedagogy of Literature, has been teaching French as a Foreign Language at the CUEF since September 2000, where she teaches courses in language, methodology, and contemporary literature. Passionate about literature, she is particularly interested in the pedagogical challenges of writing workshops in French as a Foreign Language (FLE) and leads workshops for a variety of audiences. She has also received training in creative writing and workshop facilitation through community organizations and at the university level, and holds a University Diploma in Creative Writing and Writing Professions from the University of Cergy-Pontoise.
Updated on 22, September 2026