Creativity and Narrative Task Performance: An Exploratory Study

Abstract

Methods of communicative and task‐based language teaching often employ tasks that require students to use their imagination and to generate new ideas. These tasks might provide creative learners with more chance to practice and to produce more comprehensible output, which could lead to greater success in second language acquisition (SLA) (Swain, 1985). Therefore, creativity, which involves imagination, unconventionality, risk‐taking, flexibility, and creating new classifications and systematizations of knowledge (Sternberg, 1985a), might be a potential factor that affects language learning outcomes. Despite its potential relevance, creativity has been a neglected individual difference variable in the field of SLA. Our study is the first attempt to examine the role of creativity in second‐language oral task performance. Participants in the study were Hungarian secondary school learners of English whose creativity was measured with a standardized creativity test and who performed two versions of a narrative task. We examined the relationships among three aspects of creativity—originality, flexibility, and creative fluency—and different measures of task performance, which included the number of words and narrative clauses, subordination ratio, lexical variety, and accuracy. The findings suggest that creativity is best hypothesized as a multifaceted trait, as students scoring high on various components of creativity seemed to complete the same task in different ways. Students who invented a high number of solutions on a creativity test were found to engage in more talk; thus, in a foreign language setting, they might create more opportunities for themselves to use the language. The learners characterized by a higher level of originality tended to speak less and created more complex stories in terms of the narrative structure, but at the same time, they might deprive themselves of the beneficial effects of more output. No significant relationship among creativity and accuracy, complexity, and lexical variety was found. The magnitude of the correlations, however, indicates that creativity affects participants’ output in narrative tasks only moderately. The results of the study reveal that in addition to investigating the effects of individual variables on global measures of foreign language performance, it is also possible to study their influence on specific tasks. Based on our study, we conclude that different aspects of creativity might have an effect on the amount of output students produce but not on the quality of narrative performance. Nevertheless, further research involving more participants and using different types of tasks would be necessary to be able to generalize these findings to other contexts.