Abstract
For the past few years, language teaching, especially for foreign learners, has become more and more creative. Creativity has been deemed paramount in the history of language use by human beings, including day-to-day language play and literary works. It is also suggested that creative language tasks are helpful for learners when it comes to writing. This small-scale study involving two Indonesian university students in Auckland was conducted to find out how adult learners, at any rate, take advantage of imagination in language learning. It examines the role of internal constraints and fantasy element in helping adult learners create meanings in doing creative language tasks. The results show that these two components in creative language tasks could help adult learners play with language. By combining prior knowledge and existing linguistic resources, the participants came up with new meanings from previously known concepts which did not seem to relate to each other. Specifically, input and outcome constraints are useful, while external constraints should be left out. Fantasy element is also beneficial as it requires an act of imagining. For recommendation, to stimulate students to experiment with language, teachers need to design creative tasks which have appealing topics and require them to collaborate.
Highlights
Even though many scholars have differing definitions for the term “creativity”, in general, creativity is often associated with something out-of-the-box, resulting in a new or an original outcome. Elias (2012) points out that creativity is human beings’ innate ability “to take existing elements of their environment and modify them to meet their needs” (p. 4), which is a distinct feature from animals and, from an archaeological point of view, has been evident in the material culture, such as stone-tool making and other early technologies
This study proposes that incorporating imagination to stimulate creativity in language learning can be done by designing creative language tasks which comprise at least two components, namely fantasy element and constraints
Adapting from Task-Based Language Teaching (TBLT) evaluations (Ellis, 2003, pp. 323-324), this study reports the results of a micro-evaluation which focuses on single tasks rather than a whole task-based course or macroevaluation
Summary
Even though many scholars have differing definitions for the term “creativity”, in general, creativity is often associated with something out-of-the-box, resulting in a new or an original outcome. Elias (2012) points out that creativity is human beings’ innate ability “to take existing elements of their environment and modify them to meet their needs” (p. 4), which is a distinct feature from animals and, from an archaeological point of view, has been evident in the material culture, such as stone-tool making and other early technologies. Elias (2012) points out that creativity is human beings’ innate ability “to take existing elements of their environment and modify them to meet their needs” Creativity is human beings’ natural response to adapt to their environment which touches almost all aspects of life. Some people relate creativity to more novel and concrete products, for instance, music, arts, architecture, and language. Concerning linguistic creativity, a subtle line can be drawn between creative language use in everyday life and literary creativity. The former type of linguistic creativity may originate from the notion that human beings are homo ludens who, as mentioned by Carter Experimenting with puns and proverbs, for instance, is a common activity in conversations
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