Many ESL (English as a Second Language) students in the United States enroll in   academic preparation programs and are in their late teens or early twenties. This is often a time when students are looking back on childhood in a different way. Their childhood memories and their viewpoint on those memories can be very useful for the production of wonderfully creative writing. For this project, the students began in class by closing their eyes and trying to return to their childhood years in order to bring early memories to their mind. After imagining for a few minutes, they began to tell each other what they remembered about those years and tried to describe a particular incident that stood out in their memories. That evening they wrote in their journals about the incident, embellishing   the story as much as possible. The next day, they read the story to a different partner and got feedback  . The partner's job was to: ask more questions to bring back the writer's memory; help the writer make sure that past tense verbs were used correctly, focusing on the difference between those things that were still true and needed present tense and those things that belonged specifically to the past. Two days later, students made necessary changes or additions and turned in a typed copy of their story. I then made my own comments about their work and asked them to revise their work. The third draft   produced some very good work. What did the author ask his students to write about?
What they saw around them. Their predictions for the future. Their childhood memories. Their opinions of the United States.