Language Creativity and Co-emergence of Form and Meaning in Creative Writing Tasks

Literature in Language Education

“…) or Weir (1962) the importance of language play in first language acquisition; Vygotsky (1978) argues for its significance in cognitive development. More recent research into play in language classrooms can be found, for example, in Tin (2011). Goodman and O'Halloran (2006) is an edited collection which looks at literary creativity from a number of different perspectives.…”

“…Having fun is certainly of interest in an educational context, but is not necessarily evidence of learning taking place (though 'play' and second language learning, e.g. Tin (2011), is certainly still a hot topic as I revise this second edition.) What exactly is being learned?…”

Freedom, constraints and creativity in language learning tasks: new task features

“…Studies have shown that students explore and exploit more syntactically and lexically rich utterances in creative play tasks, in particular these are tasks with higher constraints, as compared to non-creative tasks and tasks with lower constraints (e.g. Kim and Kellogg 2007;Tin 2011b). The present paper examines how language creativity, desirable for language development, can be promoted through constraints, a key feature of a creative task.…”

“…The value of creativity has been widely discussed in various disciplines such as engineering, science, design, art, education, business, linguistics and applied linguistics. In applied linguistics, language creativity is defined as the playful use of language to construct new meaning (Tin 2011b) and is a ubiquitous feature of everyday language use (Carter 2004).…”

“…Tarone (2000), for example, proposes that playful creative language can help to stretch and destablize learners' interlanguage. Tin (2011b) argues that in a creative language task which requires learners to communicate about new meanings Á meanings unknown to self, language users/learners must somehow innovate and complexify their language, by reanalysing and combining known utterances and structures to create new ideas and forms.…”