THE ROLE OF THE EFL TEACHER IN THE DEVELOPING OF CREATIVITY AMONG THEIR 1

STUDENTS.

The role of the EFL teacher in the developing of creativity among their students.

Carola Pinto Clavijo

Professor Leyla Lobos

June 17, 2018

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In order to handle with a highly unpredictable world, children and young people will

need to develop the ability to successfully sort out new situations that they will face, mainly with

flexibility and creativity. In this unknown setting, education plays a significant role, teaching

students how to develop these skills by choosing the most relevant strategies to do so. This essay

explores the importance of an EFL teacher in the developing of creativity among their students;

the concept of creativity and problem solving is explored; the role of communicative EFL tasks

in creativity is also examined; and finally, some examples from my teaching experience of how

to deal with creativity in the classroom are described.

Things are evolving so fast in our XXI century that we cannot imagine how life will be in

five or ten years from now. In this scenario, English teachers are not expected only to teach how

to communicate in the target language, but -as the Ministry of Education states in the English

curriculum- to teach how to appreciate and understand different cultures, how to interact

effectively with the rest of the world, and how to get knowledge through technological devices

and social networks. All of these require creativity and critical thinking. Creativity is defined by

Sternberg and Lubart, 1995 as “the ability to produce work that is novel and adaptive with regard

to task or situational limitations” (as cited in Ghonsooly and Behzad, 2012, p. 161). Furthermore,

there have been some authors like Hommel, Colzato, Fischer, and Christoffels (2011) who

claimed that bilingualism has a positive influence on creativity (as cited in Ghonsooly and

Behzad, 2012, p. 162), what reinforces the importance of improving our teaching strategies

within the EFL classroom.

Nevertheless, creativity is a concept usually connected to artistic or scientific areas. It is

not always clear how learners can be creative within a language learning context, and I have seen
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many times how Spanish and English teachers force creativity asking students to present

“creative works”, understanding creativity as embellishing their formats, but without clarifying

what they expect from that. Despite the above mentioned, developing communicative skills

implies developing creativity, mainly through the type of tasks involved in the practice of the

target language. That means that if an English teacher works their strategies to encourage

students to communicate in authentic situations, we will be fostering the use of creativity at the

same time. For example, the use of role playing or writing with a communicative purpose will

make the students to imagine or visualize certain situations in which they have to communicate

an idea in English clearly; presenting frequently used expressions will forced us to take the

students into diverse contexts, customs and cultures in order to fully understand and reproduce

those expressions. At the same time if we want our students to learn more complex

communicative skills such as giving arguments or making formal requests, teachers should

provide controversial topics to debate about it, or global issues that implies sorting out creative

solutions to propose and communicate to the rest of the world. On the other hand, if we are

supposed to teach our students to get new knowledge in our globalized world, we should teach

them how to be critical with what they read and share in social media/network.

Although I believe that fostering communication in an EFL classroom leads to develop

creativity in our students, I also believe that as teachers we have the duty to incorporate other

significant strategies to teach our students how to develop their creativity. As it was mentioned

by Puccio and Keller (2007) “creative thinking can be developed, […] people, through practice,

could deliberately improve their creative thinking skills” (p. 281). Considering that creativity is a

process that involves certain steps, and also “that enables individuals to address significant

challenges as they move toward a goal” (Puccio and Keller, p. 296), then it should not be
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difficult to incorporate it explicitly in the learning process. One of the skills that authors relate to

creativity is problem solving, which is also a process where, as Puccio and Keller (2007)

describe, involves three main stages: Clarification, which corresponds to becoming aware of a

predicament or an opportunity; Transformation, where we generate new possible ideas; and

Implementation, where we carry out certain solutions.

In my teacher experience I have encountered some examples of dealing with problem

solving. One of those examples is a subject created in primary in a private school called “Latino

Cordillera”, students there had a subject called “TPP” which is Spanish means “tiempo de

planificación propia”; children here had the chance to plan a personal project during the week to

be done in Fridays. That means that students decided what they want to do (for example, cooking

a cake, making a drawing, making crafts, etc.) and they had to come up with resources that we

will need, time they will use, help if they needed; in this sense, children wrote everything in the

format of a project, with a description, a Gantt chart and possible outcomes. I had the chance to

observe how these children behave years after when they encountered problems, whether they

were predicaments or opportunities, and most of those students were able to tackle different

situations and easily work on possible solutions. Another example of dealing with problem

solving in the classroom is the methodology that teachers are using in my current job, which is

the Project Based Learning. Our students decide what they want to learn, or they are exposed to a

motivating situation which has to solve through learning experiences. Then teachers connect

learning objectives from different subject within “bases curriculares” and come up with a project

together with the students; in order to solve or complete the project, students become aware of

what the need and how to do it, they also have to communicate the result of their project to the

most suitable audience. As an English teacher I also have to be creative when deciding which
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are going to be the most coherent strategies to foster creativity and critical thinking within the

project-based methodology. Our students are used to take a decision on what topics they would

like to explore in English, and how they think is the best way to learn them, this is definitely a

challenge for less experienced teachers because we have to be flexible and creative enough to

include English learning goals to the students desired topics. Also, we have to encourage

students to solve their ideas through problem solving, collaborative work and communicative

tasks.

Considering that there is a large amount of new information that is revealed every day,

children and young people are not being benefited of learning isolated content any longer.

Learning how to develop high order skills such as creativity and critical thinking becomes more

significant for students of this century. The role of teachers within this novel situation comes to

enhance the possibilities that our students have to learn the above-mentioned skills. At the same

time English teachers have the chance to foster creative and critical thinking among students by

taking informed and ethical decisions regarding how students should learn a new language

properly, and also providing learning experiences in which students are able to take their own

decisions, practice collaboration, and come up with solutions for predicaments and opportunities.
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References

Eragamreddy, N. (2013). Teaching creative thinking skills. International journal of English

language and translation studies, 1, (2), 124-145.

Ghonsooly, B., Showqui, S. (2012). The effects of foreign language learning on creativity.

English language teaching, 5, 161-167.

Puccio, G. J., Keller-Mathers, S. (2007). Enhancing thinking and leadership skills through

creative problem solving. In A. G. Tan (Ed.), Creativity: a handbook for teachers (pp.

281-301). Hackensan, NJ: World Scientific.