| Creativity refers to the process of sensing problems,finding solutions to the problems,putting forward assumptions,testing and evaluating outcomes.The concept of creativity has been used in many fields,such as business,technology,education and second language acquisition.Guilford’s address to the American Psychological Association(1950)is usually viewed as the starting point of creativity research,which leads to an upsurge in research into creativity.After that,scholars at home and abroad have conducted extensive research on the definition of creativity and how to cultivate learners’ creativity and so on.However,there are few researches on the correlation between high school students’ creativity and and their oral narrative task performance.Moreover,domestic researches on creativity all use the measurement tools invented by foreigners,which are not suitable for Chinese students.Therefore,it is necessary to carry out this study to enrich the researches in this field.Guilford(1959)believes that one of the most essential elements of creativity is divergent thinking,which refers to the ability to think out lots of original and different ideas when solving problems.In this aspect,divergent thinking abilities can be considered as appropriate to test participants’ creativity in the present study.To fill the gap,this study tends to explore the correlation between high school students’ creativity and their oral narrative task performance.Then the correlation between creativity and the four aspects of oral narrative task performance will be examined with the quantitative analysis.Specifically,the correlation between creativity and fluency,complexity,accuracy and narrative structure in the oral narrative task performance will be investigated.The study has three research questions.(1)What is the general situation of senior high school students’ creativity and oral narrative task performance?(2)What is the relationship of senior high school students’ creativity and their oral narrative task performance on fluency,accuracy,complexity and narrative structure?(3)What is the difference between the high creativity and the low creativity of senior high school students on oral narrative task performance on fluency,accuracy,complexity and narrative structure? The 43 high school students from a class in Nanchang participated in the present study.The instruments of this study include two parts: Creative Thinking Practice and a cartoon picture chosen from Torrance Test of Creative Thinking.The Creative Thinking Practice was designed by Zhen Richang and Xiao Beiling to evaluate the creativity of Chinese students by measuring the total scores of fluency,flexibility and originality.And the oral narrative task performance is measured by recording and transcribing the subjects’ utterance based on the cartoon picture in Torrance Test of Creative Thinking.The results of the study are as follows:Firstly,the 47 subjects’ creativity is at a low level based on their scores in the Creative Thinking Practice.The maximum is 87.00,the minimum is 13.00 and the mean is 41.5957,which indicates that most of the students lack of creativitySecondly,creativity is correlated to oral fluency and accuracy in the oral narrative task performance.That is to say,the participants who gain high scores in Creative Thinking Practice can produce more fluent and accurate sentences than the low participants.However,complexity and narrative structure in the oral narrative task is not correlated to creativity.Thirdly,there exists differences between high creativity and low creativity of high school students in fluency and accuracy in the oral narrative task.The high creativity participants could produce more fluent and accurate sentences than those with low creativity.But no significant differences have been found between high creativity and low creativity in complexity and narrative structure.No matter how high or low the creativity level of students is,the complexity and narrative structure in the oral narrative task will not be affected.According to the research results,the study may exert some pedagogical implications in cultivating senior students’ creativity.Specially,teachers should stimulate various novel and original responses in English learning environment.In addition,senior students should improve their awareness of the significance of creativity. |
