Once your students know who the audience is (assuming there is one) the next challenge is for them to come up with suitable ideas that can be moulded to the assignment question. Here are some typical comments from students about this problem:

It is often difficult for students to feel creative when writing in a FL. However, Koestler (1976) has shown that 'everyone, under appropriate conditions, has unsuspected creative resources'. He refers to this as 'bisociative thinking'. Abbs (1989, in Peach and Burton, 1995) also observes, from a teaching perspective, that 'creativity is not an esoteric power belonging to a few exceptional individuals, but part of our biological inheritance and part of what it is to be human'. Sherman (1994), also from a teacher's point of view, evocatively compares this generating of ideas to dropping stones in a pond to stir it up. Questions and associations are thrown into the brain until something emerges. The purpose of stirring up our mental pond is to draw a link between subject, knowledge and experience. To this end, Sherman proposes a six-stage process in generating ideas:

Sherman's model helps us to link the different points in the writing equation more actively: writer, material and readership. In particular, she points out the need for the writer to feel some sense of personal involvement in the subject being treated, an idea which also characterizes the 'literacy hour' in schools nowadays.

A more visual (and therefore, perhaps more memorable) means of generating ideas for writing is to use the (linked) processes of brainstorming and mind-mapping. Ideas, vocabulary and structures for a future writing topic can be elicited from the students and placed on the board in a bubble or tree diagram, or students can brainstorm collaboratively, in small groups. Mind maps have been popularized by the psychology writer Buzan (1993) and their structure reflects the way that thoughts emerge in a disordered way, moving back and forth between different aspects of the subject. The structure of the mind map captures the seemingly random process of thought itself. Branches can be added ad infinitum to extend thought processes, as the following example shows:

Some of the advantages of patterned planning and mind-mapping over traditional linear lists of points are as follows:

• Mind maps make better use of space.
• Mind maps concentrate all thought processes onto one page.
• Mind maps allow connections to be more easily drawn between randomly generated points, through use of numbering and arrows.
• Mind maps allow information gained from reading to be added to the page at suitable places.
• Mind maps allow key words in the assignment title to be highlighted.

Mind-mapping is useful when preparing for written homework, as it generates natural discussion and interaction between students in the FL. Working collaboratively on a plan, in turn, has many advantages:

• it increases the power of thought;
• it leads to a more rapid solution to the 'puzzle' posed by the task;
• it helps students to arrive more quickly at a better understanding of the task;
• it increases students' ability to select material and information.

However, there are also some disadvantages:

• it is more difficult to implement in 'unguided' writing situations;
• it takes up more time;
• it may not be very helpful at basic levels.

At elementary to intermediate levels, you may well prefer to provide a set of transferable structures ('useful phrases') that can be personalized by the students before becoming incorporated into their writing. For example, you may want to ask your students to write a 'journal in time'. Here, students are asked to write a diary about their day, using information from various time phases: getting up, the morning up to lunch, lunch itself, the afternoon and how the student spent the evening. Transferable phrases are given first, including time references and sequencers ('next', 'later', 'afterwards') and verb forms ('I arrived', 'I put on clothes', 'I was feeling'). Similarly, a group may be asked to describe a person well known to them. Again, this may require exposure to a list of useful adjectives in order to help students to fulfil the task ('lively', 'artistic', 'chatty', 'confident', 'awkward', 'funny', 'shy').

Once again, there are advantages and disadvantages with this sort of approach. The advantages are that:

• students at lower levels are given greater confidence;
• students know that they are writing correctly, and this boosts their self-esteem;
• students are given help in generating ideas;
• students are able to practise a particular structure more intensively.

However, you may also find that the 'model phrase' approach, when over-used, creates a 'dependency culture', in which students:

• get into the habit of constantly 'recycling' set expressions;
• use fixed expressions to disguise linguistic weaknesses elsewhere;
• over-use 'clichés';
• find it difficult to work independently.

Thus, if you are setting this kind of task, it may be worth limiting the number of 'inclusions' that the students are expected to make from the list provided. It might also be useful to insist that at least two or three of the students' own ideas are supplied, and it may be a good idea in your mark scheme to give students credit for using language more adventurously.

In writing, your students may also grapple with vocabulary choice when being asked to write down ideas. As Batchelor (1994) observes, the exactness of word choice (the 'mot juste' or 'palabra acertada') can present serious, even insurmountable difficulties for students in a FL. What is required, Batchelor argues, is a building process through which the student can come to operate exclusively in the FL. This can be achieved by supplying vocabulary through a system of 'semantic frames': groups of words clustered around a common theme. This type of technique provides useful support at both intermediate and advanced levels. An example of a 'word wheel' which covers the semantic field of 'a long way away' might be as follows. Here, additional information can be supplied to reinforce the meanings:

Fig 9.5 An example of a 'word wheel' to describe a semantic field

Your students might be asked to attribute the adjectives to a range of nouns, eg: Can a person be remote? Can a country be isolated? etc.