A Study On Creativity And Oral Narrative Task Performance By Chinese EFL Learners

A large number of studies have been carried out on some individual differences which may affect the language performance of EFL learners. However, attempts to investigating one important individual difference that may account for foreign language success—learner's creativity are quite few.The present study aims to examine the role of creativity in oral narrative task performance of Chinese EFL learners. Specifically, The relationships between three aspects of creativity:creative fluency, originality, elaboration, and different measures of task performance including quantity of talk, complexity, accuracy and narrative structure are investigated, and three hypotheses are proposed:1) Total creativity has an effect on oral narrative task performance.2) Among the four measures of task performance, the quantity of talk and narrative structure are affected by creativity while complexity and accuracy are not affected by measures of creativity.3) All the aspects of creativity have some influence on oral narrative task performance.A total of43sophomore students from two classes majoring in English from Guangdong University of Foreign Studies participated in the present study. Their English proficiency and creativity were measured by Oxford Quick Placement Test and Torrence Test of Creative Thinking, and the data of their oral narrative task performance were collected and analyzed quantitatively.The results of Pearson Correlation Analysis suggest that1) Total creativity has an effect on oral narrative task performance.2) Among the four measures of oral narrative task performance, only accuracy was found to be affected by creativity.3) Among the three aspects of creativity, creative fluency and originality are the factors which have some influence on oral narrative task performance of the participants.The results may exert some pedagogical implications in future task-based language teaching. Tasks that stimulate various novel and original responses should be encouraged in EFL learning environment.