Creativity and cognition in fiction by teenage learners of English

Abstract

Learning a foreign language provides an entry point into the lives of cultural ‘others’, as does the reading of realistic fiction. Responding to the challenges of both tasks requires concerted cognitive effort, but also creativity. First, individuals need to override the automatic tendency to prioritise their own point of view and then, at least temporarily, imagine themselves into another’s position. When reading fiction, focalisation determines whose views the readers can access, but point of view is implicit in all language. L2 learners need to recognise and imitate the world view implicit in the target language. In this article, we present both skills – empathy and mimicry – as acts of creative cognition that develop from responding to literature. This article examines works of fiction written by 15–16-year-old Swedish learners of English in response to a short story by Salman Rushdie. The story contains culturally specific information, and the ending encourages readers to recognise their own assumptions alongside the focalising character. The study draws on cognitive narratology to examine the Swedish learners’ fiction in terms of empathy and mimicry. The aims of the analyses are to determine how the short story and task design promote creative cognition, and to identify where the learners reveal a lack of understanding or an over-reliance on stereotypes.

How Does the Optimism of Students Learning a Foreign Language Affect Their Creative Self-Efficacy? The Mediating Effects of Hope and Empathy

“…Therefore, maintaining positive emotions (e.g., optimism and hope) in FL learning is important because students with positive emotions are more engaged in learning, better at self-regulation, more willing to optimize learning strategies, and more self-motivated, which can enhance their language proficiency, emotional competence, and creative thinking ( Fredrickson, 2003 ; Khodarahmi and Zarrinabadi, 2016 ; Chen and Padilla, 2019 ; Yin, 2021 ). Moreover, FLL is often accompanied by the learning of the culture in which the target language is spoken, which involves empathy for other cultures ( Kokkola et al, 2022 ). Students with high empathy are more tolerant, understanding, and accepting of foreign cultures, which leads them to think more deeply about different cultures and thus contributes to creativity ( Savchenko et al, 2018 ).…”

“…Moreover, empathizing with others is an exploration of emotional regulation ( Hu et al, 2021 ) that requires individuals to engage in creative thinking while participating in constant self-reflection, which also contributes to CSE. For FL learners, reading the FL requires cognitive effort and creativity because they must engage cognitively and emotionally with fictional characters, at which point empathy can be viewed as a creative cognitive act ( Kokkola et al, 2022 ). Therefore, it is understandable that the FLL students who were more optimistic tended to have higher levels of hope and empathy, which in turn enhanced their CSE.…”

FastKASSIM: A Fast Tree Kernel-Based Syntactic Similarity Metric

“…A syntactic similarity metric should appropriately consider differences in syntactic structure at the word-, utterance-, and document-level, as opposed to aggregating parts-of-speech or relying on domain-specific features. To our knowledge, CAS-SIM is the only metric to do this and has been proposed as a solution in applications ranging from measuring communicative alignment (Boncz, 2019;Baker et al, 2021) to evaluating stylistic creativity in language learning (Kokkola and Rydström, 2022) to clustering text (Boghrati et al, 2017). However, CASSIM relies on the expensive Edit Distance metric, and occasionally assigns high similarity scores to documents that appear syntactically dissimilar.…”