The use of authentic imaginative texts has another advantage. The experience dimension target of the English language curriculum is to develop learners' capability to use English to respond and give expression to real and imaginative experience (The Curriculum Development Council, 1999: 11). The use of language arts in this unit helped to achieve this target. With the wide variety of learner-focused activities designed by the teacher, students were encouraged to engage interactively with the texts with their fellow group members. Being asked to discover the story structure themselves and to add new elements to the tales in the writing process, the students were encouraged to be independent researchers and creative writers. Although many of the fairy tales used in the lessons were familiar to the students, the teacher provided opportunities for the learners to use the known cultural contexts as the building block for them to express their personal response from their own experience. The inclusion of modern elements in students' writing heightened students' awareness of both the old foreign cultures represented in the texts and their own. Further, through the use of literary texts, it is hoped that learners' interest in reading imaginative texts would increase and they would engage in creative writing and extended reading outside the class.

Integrated learning
In a traditional language classroom, writing is not considered in the context of other aspects of English, and is isolated from reading, speaking and listening. In a communicative classroom, however, integrated skills learning is the norm.

In this unit of lessons, students were not expected to sit down with a blank piece of paper and produce perfectly polished writing once given the topic. Instead, the teacher succeeded in incorporating various activities which supported students' completion of the final writing task. The activities in the sequence were related through the topic 'Fairy Tales' and also through the language. The activity sequence was devised in such a way that students received an input and practised some complementary skills and language items before they were expected to produce their own output.

In the first two lessons, before designing their 'missing' or 'wanted' poster for a fairy tale character, the learners were required to practise reading skills to discover the sequence of a story based on the 'cut up' text given and to extract relevant information from the stories in order to give an accurate description of the character wanted. Through these activities, students understood the chronological sequence of narrative writing and the use of adjectives to describe characters' personality and appearance.

Speaking and listening activities were also incorporated throughout this unit of lessons to prepare students to complete the final writing task. Students shared ideas in groups. They discussed with group members the design of the poster, and the structure and language of a story. According to Tiedt and her associates (2001: 124), the earliest stages of writing are social since students have to talk with one another about what to write when composing group stories.

The tasks and activities used in this unit of lessons were not performed in isolation, but were coherently planned. The success of the students in writing a modern fairy tale is a result of the preparation in earlier related activities. An important feature of this unit plan is, therefore, the interlocking nature of the activities: the skills were practised in a closely interwoven series of meaningful activities which mutually reinforced and built on each other. What is also important is that the activities involving different skills provided variety and were invaluable in maintaining students' motivation.

Collaborative learning
Various empirical studies (e.g. Bejarano, 1987; Stevens, Slavin & Farnish, 1991) suggest that students working in cooperative groups outperform those receiving traditional instruction.

In this unit, the teacher made use of collaborative learning, which entails learners working together to achieve common goals. The teacher paid heed to the role of the classroom environment in supporting students' language acquisition before the lessons started. The classroom furniture was arranged in such a way that students' interaction with group members was facilitated. Being aware of the need for more opportunities for language interaction, the teacher included a number of collaborative tasks in the lessons (e.g. designing a group poster and rewriting a fairy tale). On the one hand, students' working together to accomplish these tasks could enhance their sense of achievement. On the other hand, they were encouraged to do peer tutoring and give group support. In this relaxing learning environment, learners could participate at a level of comfort and could develop their interpersonal skills.

Reporting back
Reporting back is a strategy used to bridge the gap between spoken and written language (Gibbons, 1993). The teacher adopted this strategy as a follow-up after some active learning experience. Group representatives were required to report their work to the whole class. In this way the teacher could evaluate the learning progress of the students and provide remedial work, when necessary, and the class could have a clear understanding of the work of others and learn from each other. For example, during the presentation of poster designs, the teacher found that students had problems with the language to express rewards. In view of this, she gave students remedial help at the end of the presentations. Students were also encouraged to use visuals to illustrate their presentations, which helped them understand the importance of having visual aids as a scaffold for effective presentation.

Discussion Questions:
1. According to the Curriculum Development Council (1999: 73), reading is 'not a passive language skill whereby the reader sits back to absorb meaning effortlessly. It is fundamentally an active, purposeful and creative process'. How far do you think that this was accomplished in this unit?

2. Evaluate this unit in terms of the guidelines for assessing the appropriateness of texts provided by the Curriculum Development Council (1999: 105-106). Rate the following criteria using the 5-point ranking scale: 5 (strongly agree); 1 (strongly disagree).