Cooperative creative writing in Greek and English; writing poetry in the language classroom

In this paper, we present classroom action research during the last two school years 2020–2021 and 2021–2022 in a Senior High School (Greece) based on creative writing. The action was implemented in two target languages, Modern Greek as first (L1) and English as a foreign language (L2), during the corresponding language classes. On the occasion of an International Poetry Competition, students participated in groups and wrote cooperative poems in the two languages. In the first year, the group work was among a restricted number of students, and in the second year among students of whole classes. Each year’s project was from September to December. Both the outcomes of this teaching action and the students’ responses in a questionnaire show that in L1 and L2 classes: a) creative poetry writing and b) teaching practices, such as co-teaching, student’s collaboration, translation, and brainstorming are effective ways of teaching and learning.