1.9 1.

9 Jigsaw story writing

Level Elementary to upper-intermediate
Time 40–50 minutes
Aims To use the principle of information gap to motivate group
writing.
The use of picture stories to stimulate narrative writing in ELT is well
established. This activity uses a picture story and the principle of the
information gap to create task dependency. An information gap
activity is basically one where a student or group of students holds
information which is unknown to another student or group. This
simulates real life where communication frequently involves the
passing on of previously unknown information from one person to
another. In this activity each student has only one picture from the
sequence and students are required to share their knowledge in
order to piece the story together.

Preparation
Prepare one or several copies (as many copies as there are groups in
step 4 below) of the picture sequence of a horror story. The picture
sequence should be cut up into individual pictures for distribution to
individual students. For this example we will assume a group of
fifteen students.

Procedure
1 Put your students into groups of three.
2 Give each group or individual in a group one of the pictures, so
everyone in the group has the same picture to discuss and write
about. The diagram below shows the arrangement of the groups.

S2 S4 S8 S10 S13
S7 S15
S5 S11
S1

S3 S6 S9 S12 S14

picture A picture B picture C picture D picture E

Figure 2
3 Working together within their group, students write a paragraph
describing events in their picture. In order to ensure coherence,
it is wise to suggest that everyone works in the past tense. When
the paragraph is agreed and completed, each student writes
down his or her own copy.
4 Collect the pictures. Then reorganize the class into groups of five,
each student having a description of one picture/part of the story.
The rearrangement can be shown diagrammatically as follows:

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 1.9
A
S2 B
E
S14 S5

D C
A A
S11 S8
S1 B S3 B
E E
S13 S4 S15 S6

D C D C
S10 S7 S12 S9

Figure 3
5 Ask the students to assemble the parts into a narrative, making
necessary modifications to produce a logical story with appropriate
cohesive devices, tense sequences, etc.
6 A final stage could be reading the completed versions aloud to
compare and assess them. Below is an example of an appropriate
picture sequence.
Example

Photocopiable © Oxford University Press

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