| Approaches of communicative language teaching and task-based language teaching often require students to accomplish the tasks which immitate the situation in the real-world, thus arousing students to use their imagination and generate new ideas. Therefore, creativity, which involves imagination, unconventionality, risk-taking, flexibility, might be a crucial factor that affects language learning achievement. Despite its potential role, creativity has been a neglected variable in the field of SLA, and there are limited articles abroad and few articles at home which are focused on the correlation study between creativity and oral narrative task performance. What?s more, almost all of the previous domestic studies on creativity employed the creativity test emerged in foreign country and designed for foreign people, which may be not suitable for Chinese people; few of them considered the influential factors of planning time condition in performing tasks, which, indeed, will affect students? task performance; only three out of five facets involved in Torrance?s Test of Creative Thinking(TTCT) was taken into consideration.To fill this gap, this study went a further step in investigating the correlation between creativity and oral narrative task performance of the Chinese EFL learners under different conditions. First of all, the revised version of creativity test by Ye Renmin(1988) was suitable for Chinese participants. Besides, all the five facets involved in TTCT had been taken into consideration. Furthermore, the multiple levels of planning time ranging from 0 minute, 3 minutes to 10 minutes was served as an influential facter on the correlative relations between creativity and oral narrative task performance. Specifically, it addresses two related problems:(1) How is the creativity correlated with the oral narrative task performance of Chinese EFL learners under with( 3 minutes and 10 minutes planning time condition) and without planning time condition?(2) Are there any differences in the correlation between creativity and the oral narrative task performance of Chinese EFL learners under the different planning time conditions? If yes, what are the differences?Participants in this study are 27 sophomores from two classes majoring in Business English from Guangdong University of Foreign Studies, whose creativity is measured with a revised version of TTCT by Ye and Hong(1988) suitable for Chinese culture, and who performed three oral narrative tasks under three different planning time conditions. We examined the relationship among five aspects of creativity —— fluency, originality, elaboration, abstractness of titles and resistance to premature closure and different measures of task performance, which includes the quantity of talk, accuracy, complexity, lexical diversity, narrative structure. All the variables in this study is analyzed through quantitive evaluation with the aid of data analysis tool SPSS 17.0 by the method of Pearson Correlation anslysis.The findings may suggest that students, under no planning time, with both a higher number and more novel solutions on creativity were found to be engaged in more talk; thus, in a foreign language setting, they might employ more opportunities for themselves to use English. However, the participants characterized by a higher level of fluency and originality tend to use less diverse vocabulary in story-telling. Under the three different planning time conditions, creativity may play to its fullest under no planning time condition, therefore, language instructors may be recommended to carry out more tasks without planning time to promote students? creativity. |
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