Methodology in Language Learning: Eager beaver

 

 

Creativity is one of those grand psychological constructs that both professionals and laypeople seem to understand but no one can unambiguously define. The reason for this might be that, as mentioned earlier, creativity appears to overlap traditional ID categories. It is certainly a major constituent of intelligence. However, creativity also extends beyond the intellectual domain: there are sources of individual and developmental differences in creative performance include not only process aspects, but aspects of knowledge, thinking styles, personality, motivation, and the environmental context in which the individual operates.

Ever since those early days creativity has remained an important although somewhat underresearched subject in psychology with reviewed relevant behavioral, biological, clinical, cognitive, developmental, economic, educational, historiometric, organizational, psychometric, and social research. Otherwise thorough overview of creativity research offers no explicit definition of the term, and this is not an exception but more like the rule, although, we know what human creativity is and if there is any systematic attempt to draw up the boundaries of the concept, it is usually restricted to defining the ‘creative person,’ ‘creative thinking,’ or the ‘creative process/behavior/production/performance’ rather than the actual construct. More generally, creativity is often associated with ‘originality,’ ‘invention,’ and ‘discovery,’ as well as divergent thinking about open-ended problems and flexible problem-solving in general.

A useful strategy to produce a definition of a concept that is hard to define is to turn to a dictionary. The Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English defines creativity as “the ability to produce new and original ideas and things; imagination and inventiveness.” For a short definition this is probably as good as it gets: The first part of the definition is related to the verb ‘create,’ that is, to bring something new into existence, and the second to the concept of the ‘creative mind’ which is rich in ideas and is characterized by artistic or intellectual resourcefulness.

We can bring that notion in the following definition - creativity is the production of ideas, problem solutions, plans, works of art, musical compositions, sculptures, dance routines, poems, novels, essays, designs, theories, or devices that at the lowest level are new and of value to the creator and at the highest level are recognized, embraced, honored, or valued by all or large segments of society. Between the lowest and highest levels is a continuum of more or less recognized and useful creative productions, but always the production is new,novel, or unique relative to some definable context.

Several tests have been developed to operationalize creativity in specific measurable terms. These typically provide scores that assess both quantitative and qualitative aspects of performance.

 

How relevant is creativity to the attainment of a second language?

Students’ creativity is inhibited by certain common classroom conditions and tasks - whereas activities that are presented in a “permissive and gamelike fashion”. appear to release creativity. This is an important result for L2 researchers because many of the language tasks favored by contemporary language teaching methodologies tend to be of the latter type, involving student-centered, interaction based, and open-ended elements, and are therefore ideally suited to accommodate creative learner thinking and behavior. The fact that typical communicative L2 learning activities can accommodate, and often even require, some creative thinking on the students’ part also implies, however, that individual differences in learner creativity may considerably affect learner contribution to these tasks, a view that has also been supported by theoretical considerations.

An inherent feature of learning a new language is coping with relative novelty both in terms of the language code and the sociocultural and pragmatic conventions governing intercultural communication, Sternberg believed that creative intelligence was an important determiner of SLA. Although the assumption that creativity and language learning achievement are related is reasonable, so far only two L2 studies have been conducted to test this hypothesis.

We have adapted five subtasks to measure creativity:

ü  Consequences—presenting students with improbable situations and asking them to provide as many consequences as they could think of.

ü  Unusual Uses—asking students to list possible unusual uses for common objects such as a book or a pencil.

ü  Common Problems—asking students to list a number of problems that might occur in one of the following two everyday situations: Going to school in the morning or making a sandwich.

ü  Categories—asking students to list as many things as they could think of that belonged to a given category such as ‘things that are red or more often red than not.’

ü  Associations—presenting participants with two words, for example, ‘mirror’ and ‘rain,’ and asking them to supply a third one that could be semantically associated with these.

Students were encouraged to provide as many responses as they could think of for each task in their L1. The scores of the five subtests were correlated separately and also as a composite with the students’ English grades. All the correlations were significant, with the correlation with the total test score being the highest.

We may continuously measure how the three standard aspects of creativity—originality, flexibility, and fluency—influenced a variety of measures of task performance. two components of creativity, originality and creative fluency, were associated with some measures of task performance, but no significant correlations were found between task-related variables and flexibility or the total creativity score.

All in all, creativity is certainly an ID variable to be aware of in future L2 studies for at least three reasons: First, its theoretical significance is indisputable although its exact categorization has shown considerable (and rather confusing) variation. Second, we can construct a strong argument to explain why the emergence and spread of communicative, student-centered.

©

University of Oxford - post gradual studies 2009 'English Language Teaching'

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