THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN CREATIVITY AND GRAMMATICAL ACQUISITION OF NEW FORMS OF VIETNAMESE EFL SECONDARY STUDENTS

Abstract

            Creativity is a concept that has attracted researchers in applied linguistics recently (Dörnyei & Ryan, 2015). It has been proved to be associated with a number of variables in language learning such as the use of coordination (McDonough et al., 2015), communication strategies (Pipes, 2019), speaking performance (Suzuki et al., 2022). There seems, however, to be little research examining the relationship between creativity and other linguistic variables such as grammar or vocabulary. To fill in the gap, this study examined the association between creativity and grammatical acquisition of new forms. Eighty-nine secondary schools’ students at elementary level were invited to complete two tasks: an alternative use task to measure creativity and a grammaticality judgment task to measure their grammatical acquisition of new forms. A Pearson-product moment correlation was used to analyze the data and the study reveals no relationship between creativity and grammatical acquisition of new forms. There is also no relationship between sub-measures of creativity and the grammatical acquisition. This study also argues that students who are not naturally creative can learn language effectively, which could be considered beneficial from pedagogical perspectives. The findings also show that creativity might not emerge in monologic tasks, suggesting the use of task-based teaching should be promoted in language classrooms to foster students’ creativity and language ability. Some pedagogical implications were also offered.