Exploring The Correlation Between Creativity And The Oral Narrative Task Performance Under Two Different Task Complexity Conditions

As a very crucial and complex individual ability, creativity has been studied and probed into from different angles by many psychologists. But in the field of the second language acquisition, further researches are still anticipated as to whether creativity has any impact on the acquisition of the second language and whether there is any correlation between creativity and the second language acquisition. Especially the study of the relationship between creativity and the oral narrative task performance remains the preliminary stage.The present study explores the relationship between creativity and the oral narrative task performance under the circumstances of two tasks with different task complexity. The following research questions are addressed: (1) What are the correlations between creativity and the oral narrative task performance of the learners under two different task complexity conditions—one is simple and the other is complex? (2) How will the correlations between creativity and the oral narrative task performance of the learners vary under two different task complexity conditions? (3) Is there any significant difference between learners'oral narrative task performance when task complexity is different?The subjects were 30 non-English-major sophomores from Chongqing Technology and Business University. They were required to finish two oral narrative tasks of different task complexity at the interval of two weeks. At last, they underwent a standard creativity test, the Torrance Tests of Creativity Thinking (TTCT). All the data were analyzed by SPSS 11.5. Results indicated that in both tasks, quantity of talk was positively correlated with creative fluency; when the task was complex, quantity of talk and originality, lexical variety and creative fluency, lexical variety and originality were positively correlated; narrative structure and creative fluency, narrative structure and originality were negatively correlated. The findings indicate that there were indeed correlation between some components of creativity and measures of the oral narrative task performance. And the correlation seemed to be more salient when task complexity was high. The findings also confirmed that task complexity exerted some influence on the subjects'oral narrative task performance.