“The best-laid plans of mice and men”

Abstract An ambitious way to teach narrative skills to students speaking English as an additional language (EAL) is the use of authentic literary texts, which contain complex ideas, unfamiliar cultural references and metaphorical language that deviates from standard linguistic norms ( Ziadi, 2025 ). This study explored the impacts of authentic novella Of Mice and Men ( Steinbeck, 1937 ) on 14 year ten EAL students’ creative writing skills. After the students had been taught the novella for four weeks, they were asked to create a new ending for the story, employing Steinbeck’s style and tone. NVivo analyses of the students’ submissions indicated that all of them were able to incorporate narrative elements and imagery from the authentic text into their narratives while also inventing their own literary devices to make their stories more emotionally engaging. Two most noticeable benefits the students appeared to gain from the study of Of Mice and Men were the ‘show, don’t tell’ technique and cultural references such as ‘Garden of Eden’ and ‘Curse of Cain.’ The findings of the study suggested that carefully selected authentic literary texts can offer a quality scaffold of narrative components, useful linguistic modelling and invaluable cultural insights, helping to accelerate EAL students’ language acquisition.