creativity-in-language-teaching-2015

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Downloaded by [University of California, San Diego] at 16:02 12 March 2017 CREATIVITY IN LANGUAGE TEACHING Current, comprehensive, and authoritative, this text gives language teachers and researchers both a set of conceptual tools with which to think and talk about creativity in language teaching and a wealth of practical advice about principles and practices that can be applied to make their lessons more creative. Providing an overview of the nature of creativity and its role in second language education, it brings together twenty prominent language teachers and researchers with exper- tise in different aspects of creativity and teaching contexts to present a range of theories on both creative processes and how these processes lead to creative prac- tices in language teaching. Unique in the field, the book takes a broader and more critical look at the notion of creativity in language learning, exploring its linguistic, cognitive, socio- cultural, and pedagogic dimensions. Structured in four sections—theoretical per- spectives, creativity in the classroom, creativity in the curriculum, and creativity in teacher development—each chapter is supplemented by questions for discussion and suggestions for further research. Its accessible style makes the book relevant as both a course text and a resource for practicing teachers. Rodney H. Jones is professor of sociolinguistics and new media at the University of Reading, UK. He has published widely in the areas of discourse analysis and language and creativity. He is editor of The Routledge Handbook of Language and Creativity (2016). Jack C. Richards has had an active career in the Asia Pacific region (Singapore, Hong Kong, Indonesia, and Hawaii). He has published in the areas of teacher edu- cation, methodology, curriculum, and materials development. He is an honorary professor at the University of Sydney and the University of Auckland.

Downloaded by [University of California, San Diego] at 16:02 12 March 2017 ESL & Applied Linguistics Professional Series Eli Hinkel, Series Editor McKay/Brown  Teaching and Assessing EIL in Local Contexts Around the World Dörnyei/Henry/Muir  Motivational Currents in Language Learning: Frameworks for Focused Interventions Jones/Richards, Eds. Creativity in Language Teaching: Perspectives From Research and Practice Evans/Anderson/Eggington, Eds. ESL Readers and Writers in Higher Educa- tion: Understanding Challenges, Providing Support Hinkel  Effective Curriculum for Teaching L2 Writing: Principles and Techniques Farrell  Promoting Teacher Reflection in Second-Language Education: A Framework for TESOL Professionals Nunan/Richards  Language Learning Beyond the Classroom Christison/Murray  What English Language Teachers Need to Know Volume III: Designing Curriculum Turner  Using Statistics in Small-Scale Language Education Research: Focus on Non-parametric Data Hong/Pawan  The Pedagogy and Practice of Western-Trained Chinese English Lan- guage Teachers: Foreign Education, Chinese Meanings Lantolf/Poehner  Sociocultural Theory and the Pedagogical Imperative in L2 Educa- tion:Vygotskian Praxis and the Research/Practice Divide Brown  Pronunciation and Phonetics:A Practical Guide for English Language Teachers Birch  English Grammar Pedagogy:A Global Perspective Liu  Describing and Explaining Grammar and Vocabulary in ELT: Key Theories and Effective Practices

Downloaded by [University of California, San Diego] at 16:02 12 March 2017 deOliviera/Silva, Eds. L2 Writing in Secondary Classrooms: Student Experiences, Academic Issues, and Teacher Education Andrade/Evans  Principles and Practices for Response in Second Language Writing: Developing Self-Regulated Learners Sayer  Ambiguities andTensions in English LanguageTeaching: Portraits of EFLTeachers as Legitimate Speakers Alsagoff/McKay/Hu/Renandya, Eds. Principles and Practices of Teaching Eng- lish as an International Language Kumaravadivelu  Language Teacher Education for a Global Society:A Modular Model for Knowing,Analyzing, Recognizing, Doing, and Seeing Vandergrift /Goh  Teaching and Learning Second Language Listening: Metacognition in Action LoCastro  Pragmatics for Language Educators:A Sociolinguistic Perspective Nelson  Intelligibility in World Englishes:Theory and Practice Nation/Macalister, Eds. Case Studies in Language Curriculum Design: Concepts and Approaches in Action Around the World Johnson/Golumbek, Eds. Research on Second Language Teacher Education: A Sociocultural Perspective on Professional Development Hinkel, Ed. Handbook of Research in Second Language Teaching and Learning, Volume II Nassaji/Fotos  Teaching Grammar in Second Language Classrooms: Integrating Form-Focused Instruction in Communicative Context Murray/Christison  What English Language Teachers Need to Know Volume I: Understanding Learning Murray/Christison  What English Language Teachers Need to Know Volume II: Facilitating Learning Wong/Waring  Conversation Analysis and Second Language Pedagogy: A Guide for ESL/EFL Teachers Nunan/Choi, Eds. Language and Culture: Reflective Narratives and the Emergence of Identity Braine  Nonnative Speaker English Teachers: Research, Pedagogy, and Professional Growth Burns  Doing Action Research in English Language Teaching:A Guide for Practitioners Nation/Macalister  Language Curriculum Design

Downloaded by [University of California, San Diego] at 16:02 12 March 2017 Birch  The English Language Teacher and Global Civil Society Johnson  Second Language Teacher Education:A Sociocultural Perspective Nation  Teaching ESL/EFL Reading and Writing Nation/Newton  Teaching ESL/EFL Listening and Speaking Kachru/Smith  Cultures, Contexts, and World Englishes McKay/Bokhosrt-Heng  International English in Its Sociolinguistic Contexts: Towards a Socially Sensitive EIL Pedagogy Christison/Murray, Eds. Leadership in English Language Education: Theoretical Foundations and Practical Skills for Changing Times McCafferty/Stam, Eds. Gesture: Second Language Acquisition and Classroom Research Liu  Idioms: Description, Comprehension,Acquisition, and Pedagogy Chapelle/Enright/Jamieson, Eds. Building a Validity Argument for the Test of English as a Foreign Language™ Kondo-Brown/Brown, Eds. Teaching Chinese, Japanese, and Korean Heritage Language Students Curriculum Needs, Materials, and Assessments Youmans  Chicano-Anglo Conversations:Truth, Honesty, and Politeness Birch  English L2 Reading: Getting to the Bottom, Second Edition Luk/Lin  Classroom Interactions as Cross-Cultural Encounters: Native Speakers in EFL Lessons Levy/Stockwell  CALL Dimensions: Issues and Options in Computer Assisted Lan- guage Learning Nero, Ed.  Dialects, Englishes, Creoles, and Education Basturkmen  Ideas and Options in English for Specific Purposes Kumaravadivelu  Understanding Language Teaching: From Method to Postmethod McKay  Researching Second Language Classrooms Egbert/Petrie, Eds.  CALL Research Perspectives Canagarajah, Ed.  Reclaiming the Local in Language Policy and Practice Adamson   Language Minority Students in American Schools:An Education in English Fotos/Browne, Eds.  New Perspectives on CALL for Second Language Classrooms Hinkel  Teaching Academic ESL Writing: Practical Techniques in Vocabulary and Grammar

Hinkel/Fotos, Eds. New Perspectives on Grammar Teaching in Second Language Classrooms Hinkel  Second Language Writers’Text: Linguistic and Rhetorical Features Visit www.routledge.com/education for additional information on titles in the ESL & Applied Linguistics Professional Series. Downloaded by [University of California, San Diego] at 16:02 12 March 2017

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Downloaded by [University of California, San Diego] at 16:02 12 March 2017 CREATIVITY IN LANGUAGE TEACHING Perspectives from Research and Practice Edited by Rodney H. Jones and Jack C. Richards

Downloaded by [University of California, San Diego] at 16:02 12 March 2017 First published 2016 by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park,Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2016 Taylor & Francis The right of Rodney H. Jones and Jack C. Richards to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. First edition published by Routledge Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Creativity in language teaching : perspectives from research and practice /   edited by Rodney H. Jones, Jack C. Richards.    pages cm. — (ESL & Applied Linguistics Professional series)   Includes bibliographical references and index.   1.  Language and languages—Study and teaching—Research.  2.  Creativity (Linguistics)  3.  Psycholinguistics.  I.  Jones, Rodney H., editor.  II.  Richards, Jack C., editor.   P37.5.C74C76 2015  418.0071—dc23  2015011496 ISBN: 978-1-13-884364-6 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-13-884365-3 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-73093-6 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by Apex CoVantage, LLC

TABLE OF CONTENTS Downloaded by [University of California, San Diego] at 16:02 12 March 2017 Prefacexiii List of Contributors xv Acknowledgmentsxix SECTION I 1 Theoretical Perspectives   1 Creativity and Language Teaching 3 Rodney H. Jones and Jack C. Richards   2 Creativity and Language 16 Rodney H. Jones   3 Creativity and Language Learning 32 Rod Ellis   4 Conceptualizing Creativity and Culture in Language Teaching49 Karen Densky   5 The Vexed Nature of Language Learning and Teaching 63 James Paul Gee

x  Table of Contents   6 Translating Writing Worlds:Writing as a Poet,Writing as an Academic77 Jane Spiro and Sue Dymoke Downloaded by [University of California, San Diego] at 16:02 12 March 2017 SECTION II 95 97 Creativity in the Classroom 114 130   7 Exploring Creativity in Language Teaching 146 Jack C. Richards and Sara Cotterall   8 Creativity in Language Teaching:Voices from the Classroom Simon Coffey and Constant Leung   9 Creativity Through Inquiry Dialogue Philip Chappell 10 Creative Criticality in Multilingual Texts Julie Choi SECTION III 163 165 Creativity in the Curriculum 180 11 Creativity in the Curriculum 196 Kathleen Graves 12 Creativity and Technology in Second-Language Learning and Teaching Alice Chik 13 Creativity in Language Teaching in the Disciplines Christoph A. Hafner SECTION IV 211 213 Creativity in Teacher Development 14 A Conversation About Creativity: Connecting the New to the Known Through Images, Objects, and Games Kathleen M. Bailey and Anita Krishnan

Table of Contents  xi 15 Creativity as Resistance: Implications for Language 227 Teaching and Teacher Education Sue Ollerhead and Anne Burns 16 Cultivating Creative Teaching via Narrative Inquiry 241 Cynthia D. Nelson Downloaded by [University of California, San Diego] at 16:02 12 March 2017 Index257

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Downloaded by [University of California, San Diego] at 16:02 12 March 2017 PREFACE Creativity is increasingly recognized by planners and policy makers, school and program administrators, curriculum developers, language teachers, and language learners as an essential element in language education.At the same time, there has been to date little research or serious theoretical discussion about what creativity actually means in the context of language teaching. Creativity in Language Teaching: Perspectives from Research and Practice brings together the thinking of 20 prominent language teachers and researchers on the role of creativity in language teaching. In the past, discussions on creativity in language teaching have focused mostly on the use of creative texts (such as poetry or songs), games, and drama activities in the classroom, and its value was mainly seen in terms of increasing learners’ motivation or making learning more “fun.” This book takes a broader and more critical look at the notion of creativity in language learning, exploring its linguistic, cognitive, sociocultural, and pedagogic dimensions. Rather than a characteristic of exceptional teachers or learners or an optional ingredient that teachers can add in to “spice up” their teaching, creativ- ity, it is argued, is a necessary component of all teaching and learning and has a particularly important role in the teaching and learning of languages. The book is divided into four sections: (1) theoretical perspectives; (2) creativ- ity in the classroom; (3) creativity in the curriculum; and (4) creativity in teacher development.The chapters in each section cover a range of theoretical approaches and teaching contexts, and each chapter is supplemented by a list of Questions for Discussion and Suggestions for Further Research. No other book provides as thorough and wide-ranging a treatment of the topic. Creativity in Language Teaching: Perspectives from Research and Practice gives language

Downloaded by [University of California, San Diego] at 16:02 12 March 2017 xiv Preface teachers and researchers, especially those at the beginning of their careers, both a set of conceptual tools with which to think and talk about creativity in language teaching and a wealth of practical advice about principles and practices that can be applied to making their lessons more creative. The book is equally suited for use as a course book in MA programs in applied linguistics and language teaching and as a resource for established teachers and language-teaching researchers. It will make an important contribution to the ongoing debates about creativity in education in general and in language teach- ing and learning in particular. Rodney H. Jones Jack C. Richards

Downloaded by [University of California, San Diego] at 16:02 12 March 2017 LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS Kathleen M. Bailey is a teacher educator at the Monterey Institute of Interna- tional Studies and at Anaheim University. Her research interests include teacher development and supervision, language assessment, classroom research, and the teaching of speaking. Since 2009, she has been the chairman of the board of trustees of TIRF—The International Research Foundation for English Language Education—as well as president of that foundation. Anne Burns is professor of TESOL in the School of Education, University of NSW, Australia, and professor emerita at Aston University, Birmingham, UK. She worked for 15 years in the Australian government’s national research center for the Adult Migrant English Program (AMEP) and has extensive experience of research in the field of adult ESL and literacy. She is known internationally for her work in language practitioner action research and teacher education. Philip Chappell is a lecturer in the Department of Linguistics at Macquarie Uni- versity, Australia. He convenes the Graduate Certificate of TESOL and teaches methodology and linguistics for language teaching, incorporating systemic func- tional grammar. Phil supervises higher-degree research students in his areas of interest, which are classroom talk, teacher cognition, and dialogic teaching. Phil is also the executive editor of the English Australia Journal. Alice Chik is senior lecturer in the School of Education at Macquarie University. Her main research areas include narrative inquiry, literacy, and popular culture in language education. She is the coeditor of Popular Culture, Pedagogy and Teacher Education: International Perspectives (Routledge, 2014).

Downloaded by [University of California, San Diego] at 16:02 12 March 2017 xvi  List of Contributors Julie Choi is lecturer in education (additional languages) at the Graduate School of Education, the University of Melbourne. Her research and teaching interests are in the areas of multilingual identity development, sociolinguistics, narrative inquiry, reflective/reflexive academic writing using (auto)ethnographic approaches, and language teacher education. She is the coeditor of the book Language and Culture: Reflective Narratives and the Emergence of Identity (Routledge, 2010) and has pub- lished in the Journal of Language, Identity and Education. Simon Coffey lectures in language education at King’s College London, where he is program director of the MA in language and cultural diversity. His research interests focus on teacher professionalism and first-person narrative accounts of language learning and teaching. As well as publishing in academic books and journals (e.g., Modern Language Journal and the Journal of Language and Intercultural Communication), he is coauthor of the popular Modern Foreign Languages 5–11: A Guide for Teachers (David Fulton, 2006; 2nd ed., 2013). Sara Cotterall is associate professor at the American University of Sharjah in the UAE, where she teaches MA TESOL and research writing courses. She has been teaching and researching international university students for more than 25 years and has published on learner strategies, learner beliefs, academic writing, and doc- toral education. Karen Densky is a senior lecturer at Thompson Rivers University in British Columbia, Canada, and currently teaches EAP and TESL classes at the undergrad- uate and graduate level. She has been teaching English language learners for more than 20 years and has been involved in teacher education programs in Greenland and Chile. Her areas of research are in curriculum theory, creativity, and identity transformation of the novice language teacher. Sue Dymoke is Reader in Education in the School of Education at the Univer- sity of Leicester. She co-convened the ESRC Poetry Matters Seminar Series and edited Making Poetry Matter: International Research on Poetry Pedagogy (Bloomsbury, 2013). Other books include Drafting and Assessing Poetry (Sage/Paul Chapman, 2003) and the poetry collection Moon at the Park and Ride (Shoestring Press, 2012). Rod Ellis is a distinguished professor in the School of Cultures, Languages and Linguistics, University of Auckland, where he teaches postgraduate courses on second-language acquisition and task-based teaching. He is also a professor at Ana- heim University and a visiting professor at Shanghai International Studies Univer- sity. He has recently been elected a fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand. His published work includes articles and books on second-language acquisition, language teaching, and teacher education. His latest books are Language Teaching

Downloaded by [University of California, San Diego] at 16:02 12 March 2017 List of Contributors  xvii Research and Language Pedagogy (Wiley-Blackwell, 2012) and Exploring Language Pedagogy and Second Language Acquisition Research (with Natsuko Shintani, Rout- ledge, 2013). James Paul Gee is the Mary Lou Fulton Presidential Professor of Literacy Studies at Arizona State University. He is a member of the National Academy of Educa- tion. His books include Sociolinguistics and Literacies (4th ed., Routledge, 2011); An Introduction to Discourse Analysis (3rd ed., Routledge, 2011); WhatVideo Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy (2nd ed., Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); How to Do Discourse Analysis (Routledge, 2011); Women as Gamers:The Sims and 21st Cen- tury Learning (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), and Language and Learning in the Digital World (Routledge, 2011), both written with Elizabeth Hayes. The Anti-Education Era: Creating Smarter Students through Digital Media appeared in 2013. Professor Gee has published widely in journals in linguistics, psychology, the social sciences, and education. Kathleen Graves is associate professor of education practice at the University of Michigan. She has written and edited books on curriculum development in ELT and has coauthored two ELT series. Her research focuses on the role of classroom practice in curriculum renewal and supporting teachers’ professional development as the key to successful educational reform. Christoph A. Hafner is associate professor in the Department of English, City University of Hong Kong. His research interests include specialized discourse, digital literacies, and language learning and technology. He is coauthor of Under- standing Digital Literacies:A Practical Introduction (Routledge, 2012) and coeditor of Transparency, Power, and Control: Perspectives on Legal Communication (Ashgate, 2012). Rodney H. Jones is professor of sociolinguistics and new media at the University of Reading. His main research interests include discourse analysis, health com- munication and language, and creativity. His recent books include Discourse and Creativity (Routledge, 2012), Understanding Digital Literacies:A Practical Introduction (with Christoph A. Hafner, Routledge, 2012), and Health and Risk Communication: An Applied Linguistic Perspective (Routledge, 2013). Anita Krishnan is a graduate of the Monterey Institute of International Studies, with a master’s degree in TESOL (teaching English to speakers of other lan- guages). She holds a B.A. in journalism from New York University with a minor in linguistics, and a certificate in teaching English from the New School. Anita began her career as an ESL teacher in 2008 and has since taught English in New York City, San Francisco, and throughout her Peace Corps service in Paraguay from 2009 through 2011.

Downloaded by [University of California, San Diego] at 16:02 12 March 2017 xviii  List of Contributors Constant Leung is professor of educational linguistics in the Centre for Lan- guage, Discourse and Communication, Department of Education and Profes- sional Studies at King’s College London. His research interests include additional/ second-language curriculum development, language assessment, language policy, and teacher professional development. His most recent publication is The ­Routledge Companion to English Studies (coedited with Brian Street, Routledge, 2014). Cynthia D. Nelson is an honorary associate in the University of Sydney’s Fac- ulty of Education and Social Work and the author of Sexual Identities in English Language Education: Classroom Conversations (Routledge, 2009). She investigates language learning and identity, narrative and performance writing, and peace- conflict issues, and serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Language and Sexuality. Sue Ollerhead is a lecturer in literacies and TESOL in the School of Education at the University of NSW,Australia. She has worked in ESL and literacy teaching and training in Africa, Europe, and Australia, focusing extensively on the develop- ment of English-language materials for schools in Sub-Saharan Africa. Her main interests are learner and teacher identity in language education and critical ESL and literacy teaching pedagogies. Jack C. Richards’s career has been based mainly in Hong Kong, the United States, and Singapore. He is currently an honorary professor at the University of Sydney and the University of Auckland. He has published widely in the areas of teacher development and teaching methodology. His most recent book is Key Issues in Language Teaching (Cambridge University Press, 2015). Jane Spiro is Reader in Education and TESOL at Oxford Brookes University, Oxford, UK. She has written learner stories for Cornelson Verlag, Thomas Nel- son, and ELI Italy, a poetry collection Playing for Time (Oversteps, 2015) and a novel (Crucible Press 2002). She runs an MA for language teachers and has run workshops and teacher development programs worldwide, including in Switzer- land, Hungary, Mexico, Poland, and India. Her recent book Changing Methodologies came out in 2014 with Edinburgh University Press; she also has two books with Oxford University Press, Storybuilding (2007) and Creative Poetry Writing (2004), and a wide range of papers on creative language teaching and learner writing.

Downloaded by [University of California, San Diego] at 16:02 12 March 2017 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The editors would like to thank Ms. Zheng Yaxin for her tireless and efficient administrative and editorial assistance in preparing this manuscript.

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Downloaded by [University of California, San Diego] at 16:02 12 March 2017 SECTION I Theoretical Perspectives

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Downloaded by [University of California, San Diego] at 16:02 12 March 2017 1 CREATIVITY AND LANGUAGE TEACHING Rodney H. Jones and Jack C. Richards Introduction In recent years, there has been an explosion of interest in the notion of “creativity” in nearly all walks of life. Governments, corporations, and schools are increasingly focused on how they can help people become more creative and innovative, and, in the popular media, creativity is often portrayed as the key to personal fulfill- ment, economic advancement, and the solution to many of the most vexing prob- lems of the 21st century. It is especially in the realm of education that the value of creativity is most vigorously touted, with administrators and policy makers calling for more creative schools with more creative teachers that can produce more cre- ative students who can contribute to more creative societies. Language teachers, of course, have not been immune from this “epidemic of creativity.” In 2009, for example, the European Commission on Languages announced “The Year of Creativity,” proclaiming that “Creativity is central to language learning and hence language teaching” (European Commission on Languages, 2009), and research showing links between creativity and levels of attainment in second-language learning seem to confirm this statement (Dörnyei, 2005; see also Richards & Cotterall, this volume). At the same time, however, it seems to be increasingly difficult to foster creative language teaching in many teaching environments in which curricula and materials are more and more standardized, high-stakes language tests are more and more consequential, and teachers are more and more pressured to meet externally imposed performance benchmarks (Richards, 2013). Although many language teachers consider themselves creative, and many administrators promote the idea of creativity in their schools, there is very little

Downloaded by [University of California, San Diego] at 16:02 12 March 2017 4  Rodney H. Jones and Jack C. Richards understanding of what actually constitutes creativity in foreign-language teaching, if and why it is actually beneficial to language learning, and how it can be identi- fied, evaluated, and successfully integrated into the curriculum. Most discussions of creativity in language teaching in the past focused pri- marily on the use of “creative texts” (i.e., literature, poetry, songs) for language teaching (see, for example, Maley & Duff, 1989), or on the introduction of games and other ludic activities into the classroom (see, for example, Palmer & Rogers, 1983). More recently, it has become clear that being a creative teacher of language is much more complicated than just singing songs and playing games.There was also the assumption in the past that creativity mostly had to do with the affective dimension of language learning; that the main purpose of creative teaching was to motivate and interest students (Chastain, 1975). More recent research, however, has focused more on the cognitive and sociocultural dimensions of creativity in language teaching and learning (Ehrman & Oxford, 1995; van Lier, 2000), and the role of creativity in everyday conversation (see, for example, Carter, 2004). Changes in the way people learn (such as rapid advances in digital pedagogical technologies and the disruption of traditional practices of schooling) make it even more important for teachers to develop creative approaches to teaching. This book brings together the ideas of 20 prominent language teachers and researchers about the role of creativity in language teaching. Contributors address the issue of creativity in a variety of teaching contexts from a variety of theoretical perspectives, dealing with such topics as creative classroom practices, multilingual creativity, creativity and technology, the characteristics of creative teachers, and creative teacher training.The purpose of this book is to provide language teach- ers and researchers, especially those at the beginning of their careers, with both a set of conceptual tools with which to think and talk about creativity in language teaching and a wealth of practical advice about principles and practices that can be applied to making their lessons more creative. It is by no means intended as the last word in creativity in language teaching. Far from it. Rather, its main purpose is to facilitate more discussion and encourage more research on this important topic.To this end, each chapter is supplemented by a list of discussion questions and suggestions for further research. What Is Creativity? When we were inviting contributors for this book, most of them replied to the invitation with the same question: “Yes, but what do you mean by creativity? Is there some definition or theory of creativity that you want me to follow?” Our response was always to hand the question back to them, to ask, “What does creativity mean to you? How do you define it?” We did this not just because it seemed to be in keeping with the spirit of creativity that motivated this project in the first place but also because of our awareness that creativity is a complex and

Downloaded by [University of California, San Diego] at 16:02 12 March 2017 Creativity and Language Teaching  5 multifaceted phenomenon, and constraining our discussion to just one aspect or theory of creativity seemed counterproductive.As Nelson reminds us in her chap- ter,“in the transcultural arenas of language education, there are likely to be mul- tiple and sometimes conflicting conceptions of creativity and its value to teaching and learning.” It is therefore important, we felt, that teachers and researchers read- ing this book be given the opportunity to engage with a multiplicity of voices and perspectives. Our main objective was to find out how these experienced practitioners whom we had invited to write chapters had, in the contexts of their own classrooms and research sites, come to understand the notion of creativity. Consequently, you will not find in this volume a “unified theory of creativity.” Rather, you will find a range of definitions and perspectives informed by literature from multiple disciplines (including anthropology, psychology, sociology, linguis- tics, literature, and literacy studies) and by the rich experiences of these authors. While all of the contributors in this book introduce a slightly different take on creativity, there are a few principles about creativity in language teaching that nearly all of them share. First, in all of the chapters, there is a strong conviction that creativity is not an “optional” component in language teaching, something that we “tack onto” our lessons just to make them more interesting, or a kind of “luxury” reserved for the “talented” and “artistic” among us. Instead, creativity is seen as central to successful teaching and learning. Just as Carter (2004, p. 13) argues that “linguistic creativity is not simply a property of exceptional people but an exceptional property of all people,” so the authors in this volume argue that, in the words of Richards and Cotterall, “All teaching involves acts of creativity.” Creativity is not just ubiquitous; it is also purposeful. Real creativity is not merely decorative—it brings about valuable and concrete outcomes that are linked to the pedagogical knowledge and plans of teachers and the goals of learners (Rich- ards & Cotterall, this volume). The second principle that unites these chapters is the insistence that discus- sions of creativity in language teaching go beyond traditional notions of “cre- ative language.” Heavily influenced by literary studies, most early conceptions of creativity in language teaching focused on getting students to read and produce “creative texts,” by which was usually meant “literary” or “poetic” texts, and, in the teaching of spoken language, it took the form of drama activities in which learners were encouraged to imagine themselves in various improbable situations and come up with clever things to say. Although the contributors to this book don’t disparage these methods, most of them take a much wider view of creativity, seeing it not just as a matter of producing clever or “poetic” language but also, and more importantly, of using language in creative ways to solve problems, to establish or maintain relationships, and to get people to act, think or feel in certain ways. As Gee (this volume) argues, the real test of linguistic creativity is whether or not we are able to use language to “pull off ” situated meanings and discourses and to portray ourselves as certain kinds of people.

Downloaded by [University of California, San Diego] at 16:02 12 March 2017 6  Rodney H. Jones and Jack C. Richards This more discourse-focused view of linguistic creativity (Jones, 2010) perme- ates most of the chapters in this book, from Chappell’s work on inquiry dialogues to Choi’s focus on multilingual/multimodal texts to Hafner’s examination of cre- ative techniques for teaching scientific and legal genres.Very few of these chapters, in fact, involve examples of what are traditionally considered “creative texts.”The idea is not just that nonliterary texts are also creative but that creativity resides not just in the product (the language that is produced by learners) but in the processes teachers and learners go through to bring about the conditions in which language can be produced and in the people involved in language teaching and learning (including not just teachers and learners but also administrators, policy makers, parents, and employers), their experiences, dispositions, and relationships with one another (Ellis, this volume; Densky, this volume). Which brings us to the third principle of creativity in language teaching all the chapters in this book share, the fact that it cannot be accomplished alone. Creativity is, by its nature, social and collaborative. As Fisher (2004, p. 17) com- ments,“Success in any grand project needs help from others, means making alli- ances, means benefiting from the distributed intelligence of others—developing the ‘info-structure’—interconnectivity through learning conversations with oth- ers.” Most of the chapters in this book take a broadly sociocultural view of cre- ativity (Csikszentmihalyi, 1988), a view that, in the words of Sawyer (2006, p. 4), sees creativity as a matter “not just of individual inspiration but also social factors like collaboration, networks of support, education, and cultural background.”The collaborative nature of creativity can be seen on the micro level of dialogue in which, as both Jones and Chappell (this volume) point out, what we are able to say depends on what others have said before us and determines what they can say after us, a fact that allows us to work together to create conversations, relation- ships, and, ultimately, societies. It can be seen on the level of the classroom when, as Richards and Cotterall observe, teachers listen to their learners and learners take responsibility for and control of their learning. It can be seen in institutions that support creative teachers and give them the opportunity to develop (Cremin, Barnes, & Scoffham, 2009), as well as the “affinity groups” in which learners mutually develop “shared passions” (Gee, this volume). It can be seen in the wider domains and disciplinary communities in which language teachers participate and which provide what Graves (this volume) calls the “conceptual spaces” that define the possibilities for creative action.And it can be seen in the rich fabric of our cultures, which provide the raw materials from which we create our social lives (see Densky, this volume).As Nelson (this volume; citing Philip, 2013, p. 365), argues, language teachers cannot be expected to develop creative teaching skills in isolation; they depend on support from a “system of interactions” involving institutional leaders, peers, colleagues, and other experts. There are, of course, plenty of ways that other people (institutions, communi- ties, and cultures) can constrain our creativity as well, but even such constraints can

Downloaded by [University of California, San Diego] at 16:02 12 March 2017 Creativity and Language Teaching  7 sometimes foster the conditions for creative resistance, as Ollerhead and Burns (this volume) point out in their discussion of the ways teachers devise and imple- ment innovation in the face of policies and institutions that act to limit creativity. “Creativity,” as Jones (2010, p. 477) puts it,“is to a large extent a matter of finding our way around constraints or limitations placed on us by the discourses within which we operate.” Related to this notion of collaborative creativity is the realization that all cre- ativity somehow builds upon work done in the past. Creativity does not nec- essarily require that we reinvent the wheel. Creative language use and creative language teaching are often a matter of refashioning, recontextualizing, and build- ing upon the words and ideas of others (Pennycook, 2007).This realization can be a great relief to teachers and learners intimidated by the “cult of originality” that permeates much of the discourse on creativity. Finally, nearly all the chapters in this book either directly or indirectly embrace the idea that creativity is somehow transformative, that, while much of creativity involves the appropriation and recombination of existing ideas, and some creativ- ity involves thinking of new ideas within the boundaries of a domain’s traditional conceptual boundaries, the real power of creativity is its potential to fundamen- tally transform what we are doing when we are teaching language. These trans- formations can occur in different ways and on different levels, from the small but consequential ways learners creatively transform their identities as they learn a new language to the creative acts that teachers engage in day after day of trans- forming “the subject matter of instruction into forms that are pedagogically pow- erful” (Richards & Cotterall, this volume) to the ways teachers share stories of their experiences, “interrupting . . . habitual ways of teaching” and transforming past events into “possible futures” (Conle, 2000; see also Jones, 2011), and finally to the ways entire disciplinary domains can be transformed when teachers, learn- ers, administrators, and policy makers are willing to work together to take risks (Cremin, Barnes, & Scoffham, 2009). The most important transformation creativity can bring about is a transforma- tion in agency, resulting in increased self-efficacy and empowerment on the part of teachers and learners. As Freire (1970, p. 65, quoted in Ollerhead and Burns, this volume) proclaims, “critical pedagogy is based on creativity and stimulates true reflection and action upon reality, thereby responding to the vocation of persons as beings who are authentic only when engaged in inquiry and creative transformation.” The Structure of this Book The book is divided into four sections: (1) Theoretical Perspectives, (2) Creativity in the Classroom, (3) Creativity in the Curriculum, and (4) Creativity in Teacher Development. The chapters are arranged to provide the reader with a coherent

Downloaded by [University of California, San Diego] at 16:02 12 March 2017 8  Rodney H. Jones and Jack C. Richards pathway from theory to practice, though it is not necessary to read the chapters in this sequence, and indeed, many of the chapters do not strictly abide by the neat topical divisions of the sections. Most of the chapters in the theory section, for example, illustrate their points with examples from classroom practice, and all the chapters on classroom practice have strong theoretical underpinnings. The divi- sion between the classroom and the curriculum is also blurry, with some of the chapters like Coffey and Leung’s chapter on teachers’ perspectives of creativity, Chik’s chapter on creativity and technology, and Hafner’s chapter on creativity in discipline-specific English teaching making explicit attempts to link broader cur- ricular questions with descriptions of concrete classroom practices. Finally, issues related to teacher development, especially the ways institutional and cultural con- texts affect creative teaching are, to some degree, taken up throughout the book. The book begins with a discussion by Rodney H. Jones on the relationship between language and creativity. The questions he addresses are, first, whether there are certain fundamental features of language that make it a particularity good tool for the exercise of creativity and, second, whether or not creativity is in some way a requirement for a successful language user. He answers these ques- tions by identifying four design features or “affordances” (Gibson, 1986) of lan- guage that make it a tool for creativity, and four “affective abilities’ learners should develop to take advantage of these affordances.The argument he makes represents the view expressed throughout this book that in addressing the issue of creativity, it is not enough to confine one’s focus to the “product” (“creative language”) or to the “people” (“creative teachers or learners”) but that we must also examine how products and people interact in the various processes we go about to cre- atively take actions in our social environments, solve problems, and work together to generate new ideas and new realities. “What is ‘creative’ about language,” he writes, “is that it allows us to do things in the world; to solve problems, to form and maintain social relationships, to get what we want, and to avoid getting what we don’t want. And what is ‘creative’ about language users is that they are able to exploit language’s inherent capacity for creative action.” In the next chapter, Rod Ellis focuses on the creative processes involved in learning a language and the inherent creativity of learner language. Taking up the emphasis on creative action introduced by Jones, Ellis discusses the strategies that learners engage in to “make do’ ” with their limited command of grammar and vocabulary while at the same time actively building abstract systems that allow them to use whatever scant linguistic resources they have available to them in creative ways. “All language learners engage in the creative construction and creative use of their linguistic systems,” he writes. “That is, they naturally and automatically work on the raw materials provided by the input, combining words, breaking down multiword units into their component parts, and thereby arriving at abstract formulations that slowly and erratically converge on those of the target language.” Thus, what are often considered errors by language teachers might

Downloaded by [University of California, San Diego] at 16:02 12 March 2017 Creativity and Language Teaching  9 be more usefully seen as evidence of the creative processes learners are going through to “make sense” of the target language and “make do” with whatever linguistic resources are available to them at any given moment, processes that are facilitated by many of the “design features” of language discussed by Jones, such as the generative power of grammatical systems and the tendency for language to make available formulaic sequences that allow us to perform basic communica- tive functions. At the same time, it is possible, Ellis points out, for learners to be “too creative” in their invention of new linguistic forms.Thus, part of the job of language teachers is to provide space to allow learners to engage in experimenta- tion with the target language while at the same time helping them strike a balance between creativity and conformity. The third chapter by Karen Densky extends the discussion of creativity to the c­ onsideration of the role of culture in language teaching and learning. Like Jones and Ellis, Densky acknowledges that creativity involves the interaction among three components—the person, the product, and the process—and argues that all of these components play an important role in creativity in all cultures, though some of these components might be more valued in some cultures, while others might be more valued in others. The real value of Densky’s chapter is that she broadens our understanding of creativity in language teaching from the primar- ily linguistic perspective offered by Jones and the primarily cognitive perspective offered by Ellis, showing how a host of mental, social, cultural, environmental, and historical factors can affect creativity, including the relationship between teacher and learner, the heritage and traditions of the learner, imagination and critical thinking, risk taking, notions of judgment and quality, and even political acceptance. In the fourth chapter, James Paul Gee continues to broaden our understand- ing of creativity, in his case by challenging some of our most basic assumptions about what it means to teach a language and even what we mean by the term “language.”The focus of language teaching, he argues, should be less on linguistic forms and more on the “situated meanings” and “social languages” that we use to build our identities and participate in what he calls “capital D Discourses.” The goal of creative language teaching, he writes, should be “helping learners to be able to use language in combination with ways of acting, interacting, valu- ing, and using objects, tools, and technologies so as to ‘pull off ’ consequential identities.” Building on an analysis of how people learn to play the Japanese card game Yu-Gi-Oh (which involves both learning the particular “social language” associated with the game and taking on an identity as a certain type of player), he formulates 11 recommendations for how to make language teaching more creative and to tap into the creative capacities of learners, which include offering multiple ways to learn through multiple media and forms of social interaction, not divorcing language from action and experience, giving learners opportuni- ties to “make, design, lead and follow, teach and learn, discuss and argue, and gain

Downloaded by [University of California, San Diego] at 16:02 12 March 2017 10  Rodney H. Jones and Jack C. Richards a shared passion for what they are doing,” and learning from manufacturers of games likeYu-Gi-Oh to think of teaching as “designing and resourcing a learning system with moving parts.” The final chapter in this section by Jane Spiro and Sue Dymoke provides a concrete account of some of the principles discussed in the previous chapter by Gee, describing the kinds of shifts in identity language users experience as they navigate transitions across what they call “writing worlds” (what Gee would call “Discourses”). The examples they give are from a study of academics who also engage in writing poetry, thus having to transverse the discourse of poetry and that of academic writing, and the particular “forms of life” (Wittgenstein, 1973) associated with these types of writing. Spiro and Dymoke compare these trans- versals to the kinds of identity shifts language learners need to negotiate as they switch from speaking one language to speaking another. What is interesting in their analysis is that they identify the locus of creativity not in one form of writing or another (either poetry or academic writing) nor, in the case of language learn- ers, in one language or another, but rather in the ability for writers and learners to flexibly commute between Discourses, discarding, taking on, and sometimes mixing identities, “reorganiz(ing) and in some ways organiz(ing) anew the plots of their life stories” (Pavlenko & Lantolf, 2000, p. 219) as they learn and use dif- ferent “social languages.” The second section of the book focuses more explicitly on classroom practices. It begins with a chapter by Jack C. Richards and Sara Cotterall in which they attempt to describe both the practices of creative teachers and the underlying abilities, beliefs, and dispositions that form the basis for such practices.The exam- ples they use come primarily from the experiences of Cotterall in teaching aca- demic writing in the United Arab Emirates, but the insights in this chapter come as well from the authors’ observations over many years as teachers, teacher trainers, materials developers, and language teaching researchers. They boil down these observations into 11 characteristics of creative teachers, among which are flexibil- ity, willingness to take risks, a rich store of academic and pedagogical knowledge, a commitment to finding new ways to do things and to developing an individual teaching style, and the innovative use of technology in teaching.They then go on to identify ways in which institutions can support teachers in developing these capabilities, including recognizing and rewarding creative practices and providing opportunities for collaboration and creative partnerships. An important message from this chapter is that although much of creative classroom practice depends on the characteristics of individual teachers, these characteristics are developed and nurtured in collaboration with learners and colleagues in the context of creative schools and other institutions. In the next chapter, Simon Coffey and Constant Leung continue to focus on teachers’ beliefs and practices, starting with the assumption that, like all pol- icy goals, the goal to make language teaching more creative is understood and

Downloaded by [University of California, San Diego] at 16:02 12 March 2017 Creativity and Language Teaching  11 implemented differently by different language teachers working in different con- texts within a situated view of professionalism (Leung, 2013). In documenting and analyzing how teachers respond to the question “What does creativity mean for you in the context of language teaching?,” they note a number of underlying ten- sions: the tension between an understanding of creativity associated with language use and one associated with pedagogic practice; a tension between safety and risk taking; and a tension between the goals and aspirations of individual teachers and the rules and requirements imposed by institutional settings. These discus- sions with teachers reveal that, far from an elusive quality of special individuals, most language teachers regard creativity as a concrete professional skill, one that is shaped by their beliefs and values about language teaching and learning, their ideas about what constitutes effective pedagogy, and the particular demands of the contexts in which they teach. In the third chapter in this section, Philip Chappell echoes the sociocultural approach to language introduced by Jones in the first chapter and applies the concepts of mediation and social cognition to concrete classroom practices, spe- cifically to the use of what he calls “inquiry dialogue” to create opportunities for learners to explore, share, and enquire about topics that matter to them and to engage in collective thinking. Like Jones, Chappell assigns to language itself a central role in enabling and affording creativity and collective cognition. Certain types of talk, however, are more conducive to creativity than others.While tradi- tional discussion activities mostly consist of learners transacting information and opinions, inquiry dialogue allows learners to work together to build new knowl- edge and generate new ideas. Such talk naturally facilitates what Csikszentmihalyi (1997) calls “flow,” a peak state in which the people involved in the conversation become absorbed in a common goal. Creating the conditions for such a state to emerge, Chappell suggests, is one of the central tasks of the creative language teacher. In the final chapter in this section, Julie Choi explores how creativity can be fostered in language classrooms by giving students an opportunity to compose texts using the full array of semiotic resources available to them (including differ- ent languages as well as images) in order to communicate the multiplicity of their identities. She describes the results of an assignment in multimodal composition she set in a course for Japanese and Chinese students on Australian language and culture and uses this description as a launching pad to talk about the relation- ship among creativity, multilingualism, multimodality, and identity. While many language classrooms enforce a second-language monolingualism, Choi insists that allowing students to use their entire range of linguistic resources, and to mix codes and modes, is a way to encourage creativity. She draws heavily on the work of Li Wei on how “translanguaging” affords learners opportunities to push and break boundaries “between the old and the new, the conventional and the original, and the acceptable and the challenging” (Li, 2011, p. 1223). In the end of the chapter,

Downloaded by [University of California, San Diego] at 16:02 12 March 2017 12  Rodney H. Jones and Jack C. Richards Choi calls for language teachers to move away from narrow, monolingualist views of language learning and to embrace the translingual reality of learners. It is only by doing so that we can tap into the unique creative resources that are available to teachers and learners in multilingual and multicultural settings. The third section of the book deals more with the role of creativity on the level of curricula, but these chapters also describe curriculum-driven creative classroom practices.This section has three chapters, the first consisting of a more theoretical discussion of creativity in the language curriculum by Kathleen Graves and the second two focusing on particular dimensions of language curricula, Alice Chik’s chapter addressing ways of creatively integrating technology into the language curriculum (as well as of creatively integrating language education into a tertiary general education curriculum), and Christoph A. Hafner’s chapter addressing cre- ative ways of teaching English for particular disciplines like science and law. Graves’s chapter draws on notions of creativity developed in cognitive science, especially the work of Margaret Boden (2004), conceptualizing creativity as a generative system within a domain of thinking. Creativity in curricular design, she argues, involves “exploring the conceptual space of curriculum, experimenting with its constraints, identifying gaps and discovering new possibilities, and poten- tially transforming it.” She goes on to develop these ideas in several case studies of curricular innovation, some of which she judges more “transformational” than others.An important point she makes is that for a creative innovation in curricu- lum to be truly transformative, it must take into account all levels and dimensions of the system from the scale of the individual teacher to the wider scale of the school system. In her chapter on technology, the first thing Chik does is to caution against the assumption that the introduction of technology automatically makes teach- ing more creative. She then goes on to argue that when technology is introduced creatively, it can sometimes result in unexpected benefits. She illustrates this point with a description of the adoption of a new technological interface, Google Maps, in a University general education course. The interface, she points out, was not introduced to encourage students to improve their English, but that was its effect, because, as learners adapted their production processes to the new technology, they opened up new possibilities for creative language learning and use. Hafner’s chapter starts by challenging the assumption that courses devoted to helping learners master often standardized specialized academic and professional genres leave little room for creativity. In fact, he argues, professional communica- tion is an inherently creative process of balancing the generic requirements of the disciplinary community with one’s own private intentions (see also Bhatia, 1993). He goes on to describe a basic principle for Language for Specific Purposes (LSP) task design, which involves students not only in language production but also in some kind of transformation, transforming, for example, spoken genres into w­ ritten genres or specialized genres into popular genres. Such transformations

Downloaded by [University of California, San Diego] at 16:02 12 March 2017 Creativity and Language Teaching  13 engage students in a “creative challenge, which is both linguistic and multimodal,” forcing them to simultaneously focus on language, audience, and communicative intention in new ways. In the final section of the book, the authors deal with the role of creativity in language teacher development. The first chapter, by Kathleen Bailey and Anita Krishnan, is written in the form of a dialogue between a teacher educator (Bai- ley) and her student (Krishnan) in which they discuss the meaning of creativity and some of the creative techniques Bailey uses to inspire, motivate, and help her graduate students understand difficult concepts. In the course of this conversa- tion, a number of important points are made about how the creative use of things like visual aids, metaphors, and games can enhance students’ mastery of abstract concepts and help them apply these concepts in creative and effective ways. It also illustrates the ways teacher educators can model creative classroom practices for novice teachers. Finally, the chapter itself constitutes an effective exemplar of cre- ative teacher education as Bailey and her student engage in the kind of “inquiry dialogue” that Chappell talks about in his earlier chapter. In the second chapter of this section, Susan Ollerhead and Anne Burns describe how language teachers manage to exercise creativity even within the constraints imposed on them by top-down ministerial policies,standardized curricula and mate- rials, and performance benchmarks. Following Ahearn (2001, p. 112), they define creativity as a person’s “socio-culturally mediated capacity to act,” and show, through an account of case study research conducted within Australia’s Language, Literacy and Numeracy Program (LLNP), that, despite conditions that constrain their agency, teachers still manage to find their way around the obstacles placed in their paths and create for learners authentic and expressive ways to use the a target language. From this perspective, creativity is seen not just as a pedagogical choice but also a political one, an act of “resistance.”The extent to which the teachers they studied were able to exercise this kind of creativity, they argue, depended on their ability to make sense of their teaching situations, an ability that is deeply rooted in what Stritikus (2003) describes as their “pedagogical, personal and political ideologies.” In the final chapter of the book, Cynthia Nelson advocates creative storytell- ing as a tool for second-language teacher development. Sharing teaching/learning narratives for collegial support, she argues, not only helps teachers expand their creative repertoire but also promotes self-reflection, illuminating the dynamic theorizing and underlying emotions that lie behind their practices. For Nelson, what is creative about teacher narratives is not just the way they are put together but the way they are interpreted by listeners and by the storytellers themselves. By “reading around” the texts they produce, teachers can find hidden insights and networks of interdiscursivity that they never knew existed (Jones, 2010, p. 477). Because narratives often involve multiple perspectives, sharing them can give rise to multiple interpretations, sparking productive conversations among language teachers and language teaching researchers.

Downloaded by [University of California, San Diego] at 16:02 12 March 2017 14  Rodney H. Jones and Jack C. Richards It is precisely these kinds of productive conversations—“inquiry dialogues,” to once again use Chappell’s term—that this volume hopes to facilitate. These conversations may be engaged in in structured ways by students using this book in teacher training courses, or they may occur informally in corridors, in teach- ers’ lounges, or around coffee machines. “Creativity” is a term that is frequently bandied about in discussions of language teaching but is seldom sufficiently inter- rogated. It is an “ingredient” that teachers, administrators, policy makers, and stu- dents all seem to want to introduce into the language classroom, but little research or serious theorizing has so far been conducted on how to do so. The most important thing we can say by way of introducing this book is that it is meant merely to serve as the beginning of a conversation in which much more remains to be said. References Ahearn, L. (2001). Language and agency. Annual Review of Anthropology, 30, 109–137. Bhatia,V. K. (1993). Analyzing genre: Language use in professional settings. London: Longman. Boden, M. A. (2004). The creative mind: Myths and mechanisms (2nd ed.). London: Routledge. Carter, R. (2004). Language and creativity:The art of common talk. New York: Routledge. Chastain, K. (1975). Affective and ability factors in second-language acquisition. Language Learning, 25(1), 153–161. Conle, C. (2000). Narrative inquiry: Research tool and medium for professional develop- ment. European Journal of Teacher Education, 23(1), 49–63. Cremin,T., Barnes, J., & Scoffham, S. (2009). Creative teaching for tomorrow: Fostering a creative state of mind. Kent: Future Creative CIC. Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1988). Society, culture, and person: A systems view of creativity. In R. J. Sternberg (Ed.), The nature of creativity (pp. 325–339). New York: Cambridge Uni- versity Press. Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1997). Creativity: Flow and the psychology of discovery and invention. New York: Harper Perennial. Dörnyei, Z. (2005). The psychology of the language learner. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Ehrman, M. E., & Oxford, R. L. (1995). Cognition plus: Correlates of language learning success. Modern Language Journal, 79(1), 67–89. European Commission on Languages. (2009). Creativity in language learning (Updated on April 16, 2013). Retrieved April 7, 2014, from http://ec.europa.eu/Language-es/ language-teaching/creativity-and-language_en.htm Fisher, R. (2004).What is creativity? In R. Fisher & M.Williams (Eds.), Unlocking creativity: Teaching across the curriculum (pp. 6–20). New York: Routledge. Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York: Continuum. Gibson, J. J. (1986). The ecological approach to visual perception. Boston, MA: Psychology Press. Jones, R. (2010). Creativity and discourse. World Englishes, 29(4), 467–480. Jones, R. (2011). Sport and re/creation: What skateboarders can teach us about learning. Sport, Education and Society, 16(5), 593–611. Leung, C. (2013). Second/additional language teacher professionalism—What is it? In M. Olofsson (Ed.), Symposium 2012: Lärarrollen I svenska som andraspräk

Downloaded by [University of California, San Diego] at 16:02 12 March 2017 Creativity and Language Teaching  15 (pp. 11–27). Stockholm: Stockholms Universitets Förlag. Retrieved July 25, 2014, from www.andrasprak.su.se/publikationer/nationellt-centrums-symposierapporter/ symposium-2012-l%C3%A4rarrollen-i-svenska-som-andraspr%C3%A5k-1.136476 Li,W. (2011). Moment analysis and translanguaging space: Discursive construction of iden- tities by multilingual Chinese youth in Britain. Journal of Pragmatics, 43, 1222–1235. Maley, A., & Duff, A. (1989). The inward ear: Poetry in the language classroom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Palmer, A., & Rodgers, T. S. (1983). Games in language teaching. Language Teaching, 16(1), 2–21. Pavlenko, A., & Lantolf, J. P. (2000). Second language learning as participation and the (re) construction of selves. In J. P. Lantolf (Ed.), Sociocultural theory and second language learning (pp. 155–178). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pennycook,A. (2007).“The rotation gets thick.The constraints get thin”: Creativity, recon- textualization, and difference. Applied Linguistics, 28(4), 579–596. Philip, R. (2013). Cultivating creative ecologies: Creative teaching and teaching for cre- ativity. In S. Frielick, N. Buissink-Smith, P. Wyse, J. Billot, J. Hallas, & E. Whitehead (Eds.), Research and development in higher education: The place of learning and teaching, 36 (pp. 360–369).Auckland, New Zealand: HERDSA. Richards, J. (2013). Creativity in language teaching. Plenary address given at the Summer Institute for English Teachers on Creativity and Discovery in Teaching University Writ- ing, City University of Hong Kong. Sawyer, K. (2006). Explaining creativity:The science of human innovation. Oxford: Oxford Uni- versity Press. Stritikus, T.T  . (2003). The interrelationship of beliefs, context and learning: The case of a teacher reacting to language policy. Journal of Language, Identity and Education, 2, 29–52. van Lier, L. (2000). From input to affordance: Social-interactive learning from an ecological perspective. In J. P. Lantolf & S. L. Thorne (Eds.), Sociocultural theory and second language learning (pp. 155–177). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wittgenstein, L. (1973). Philosophical investigations (G.E.M. Anscombe, Trans.) (3rd ed.). New York: Pearson.

Downloaded by [University of California, San Diego] at 16:02 12 March 2017 2 CREATIVITY AND LANGUAGE Rodney H. Jones Introduction The chapters in this book provide different perspectives on the relationship between language teaching and creativity, exploring things like “creative pedago- gies,” the value of encouraging people to engage in “creative problem solving” and “creative dialogue” in the course of teaching and learning, and the inherent “creativity” of learner language. Taken together, these chapters present a strong argument for creativity as a means to make language lessons more engaging, to make learners more motivated to use the target language, and to make teachers more effective at teaching it. The question I propose to explore in this chapter is more basic: whether there is some fundamental relationship between creativity and language itself that lan- guage teachers need to take into account as they search for more creative ways to teach it.This question can really be divided into two questions: (1) What are the characteristics of natural languages that make them particularly powerful tools for the exercise of creativity? and (2) In what ways does the successful use of language require creativity? Answering these two questions, of course, requires that we define what we mean by “creativity,” and, as it turns out, each of these questions assumes a rather different definition. The first implies a definition of creativity as an outcome of language use.The second implies a definition of creativity as a quality of language users. Both of these definitions of creativity have long histories in the social sciences and humanities, as well as in education.The first is the dominant conceptualiza- tion of creativity in linguistics and literary studies, where creativity is regarded as a

Downloaded by [University of California, San Diego] at 16:02 12 March 2017 Creativity and Language  17 quality of particular texts and utterances.Traditionally, creativity has been associ- ated with “literary language,” defined by Jakobson (quoted in Eagleton, 2011, p. 2) as “organized violence committed on ordinary speech.”There are two important aspects to this definition. First is the notion that “creative” or “literary” language is, by its very nature, extraordinary, unique, somehow different from the language that we use in everyday interactions, and second is the idea that the source of this uniqueness lies nevertheless in the organized deployment of various linguis- tic resources (such as rhyme, rhythm, and metaphor). Although there have been numerous recent attempts to show that literariness is a quality that is not restricted to poems and novels but also pervades everyday uses of language (see, for example, the work of Carter, 2004; Cook, 2000), this notion that linguistic creativity is something out of the ordinary, divorced from the practical concerns of everyday conversation, still dominates, and this in itself is enough to make many language teachers wary of encouraging their students to produce “creative language.”After all, they may reason, they need to teach their students how to use the target lan- guage to get by in the world and, often, to get a job, not to become “poets.” The definition associated with the second question, that of creativity as a quality of language users, is the prevalent definition in psychological studies of creativity, which attempt to identify the psychological, cognitive, or emotional characteristics that make some individuals more “creative” than others. This is the perspective behind various attempts to test people’s creative capacities using instruments such as the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking (1968), which are still administered in many educational contexts. Many such tests are based on the theory that the chief characteristic of creative people is their ability to engage in a complex combination of divergent and convergent thinking (Sawyer, 2006). Some psychologists have argued, however, that such tests are not very good measures of creativity, and some studies (see, for example, Barron & Harrington, 1981) have demonstrated that high scores on tests of “creativity” don’t correlate very well with real-life creative output. Other psychologists have even gone so far as to question the very idea of the creative individual, arguing that creativity is as much a quality of the social context in which individuals create as it is of minds of indi- viduals (see, for example, Csikszentmihalyi, 1988).We can’t be creative alone—we need the input, interaction, feedback, and all the various tools and conventions that our societies supply. This definition of creativity—as a quality of the learner—can also have the effect of dissuading teachers from trying to get their learners to learn in “creative” ways.After all, a focus on creativity might actually disadvantage learners who may be, by nature,“less creative.” Even more suspect is this notion of “divergent think- ing,” which, like the definition of creativity derived from poetics, implies that cre- ativity is primarily about doing things “differently,” while many language teachers see as the biggest part of their job helping learners become better at “following the rules” of the target language.

Downloaded by [University of California, San Diego] at 16:02 12 March 2017 18  Rodney H. Jones Both of these definitions of creativity, then, are highly problematic for lan- guage teachers, and neither of them actually sheds much light on the fundamental relationship between creativity and language. In the discussion that follows, I will propose a perspective on creativity and its relationship to language that I believe will have much more utility for language teachers and learners, one that can help reveal how, as Maybin and Swann (2007, p. 491) put it, creativity is “a property of all language use in that language users do not simply reproduce, but recreate, refashion, and recontextualize linguistic resources in the act of communicating.” My perspective is broadly based on the principles of mediated discourse analysis (Norris & Jones, 2005; Scollon, 2001), an approach to language that focuses less on language itself (its forms and structure) and more on the way people use language as a tool to accomplish social actions. From this perspective,“creativity” is located neither in the mind of the “creative person” nor in the qualities of the creative “product” (the language they produce) but in the tension between what people want to do and the things language allows them to do (Wertsch, 1994).What is “creative” about language is that it allows us to do things in the world: to solve problems, to form and maintain social relationships, to get what we want, and to avoid getting what we don’t want. And what is “creative” about language users is that they are able to exploit language’s inherent capacity for creative action. This focus on action gives us a way of reconciling the two definitions of creativ- ity discussed earlier, creativity as product (“creative language”) and creativity as process (engaged in by “creative people”).As Gl˘aveanu (2013) puts it: Embedding the creative process within the broader concept of action means acknowledging the double nature of creativity: an internal, psychological dimension and an external, behavioral one. What the notion of human action signifies is the interconnected aspect of these two facets and the fact that one cannot be reduced or properly understood without the other. (p. 73) Language as a Cultural Tool The idea that a fundamental quality of language is its capacity for facilitating creativity is, of course, not new. Chomsky, for instance, from his earliest work, saw as language’s defining property the fact that “it provides the means for expressing indefinitely many thoughts and for reacting appropriately in an indefinite range of new situations” (Chomsky, 1965, p. 6). Chomsky’s notion of linguistic creativity, however, is largely limited to its “generative” properties—its ability to generate an infinite number of combinations from a finite number of rules,which only accounts for part of what I mean by creativity.What I mean when I speak of the creative potential of language goes beyond the ability to generate new forms.We must also consider what we are able to do with these forms. As Widdowson (2008, p. 503)

Downloaded by [University of California, San Diego] at 16:02 12 March 2017 Creativity and Language  19 argues,“there is no . . . way of being creative by focusing on the message form . . . creativity is a function of how the message form interacts with other speech act conditions.” Seeing language as a tool for action is the starting point for many modern theo- ries of discourse, including pragmatics, with its interest in “speech acts” (Austin, 1976) and conversation analysis, which sees conversation as “joint action” (Clark, 1996). It is an idea that has also influenced work in linguistic anthropology (Ever- ett, 2012), the “new literacy studies” (Gee, 2014; this volume), and sociocultural approaches to language teaching (van Lier, 2004). One of the most important articulations of the “tool-like” qualities of language is found in the work of Soviet psychologist Lev Vygotsky (1962), for whom all human actions are mediated through “cultural tools,” language being among the most important. In his stud- ies of how children learn, he identified language as an essential tool not just for transmitting thoughts to others but for having thoughts to begin with, for solving problems, and for being a member of a community. What makes language such a good tool for thinking, acting, and relating to others is that it has built into it certain affordances.The term “affordances” comes from the perceptual psychologist James J. Gibson (1986), who used it to describe the potential that things in the environment, including technologies, have for serving as tools to perform certain actions. Affordances are, as (Gee, 2014, p. 16) puts it, “what things are good for, based on what a user can do with them.” van Lier (2004, p. 95) refers to the affordances of language as “relations of possibil- ity between language users (which) make more linguistic action possible.” The features of language that create such possibilities, he says, include not just words and grammar but also “rhythm, voice quality, intonation, stress, gestures, facial expressions . . . turn-taking signals, hesitations, (and) repetitions” as well as “con- versational and situational logic” (van Lier, 2004, p. 90). But as any language learner (and teacher) knows, affordances are not particu- larly useful if you don’t have the ability to make use of them or, as Gee (2014, p. 16) explains,“Affordances are only affordances . . . given that a potential user of the object has the ability to use the object to carry out the action it affords.The user must have what we can call an effective ability, the ability to effect (carry out) the affordance.” From this perspective, the enterprise of language teaching can be seen as help- ing students acquire the effective abilities to make use of the various affordances that language has to offer and to align (Gee, 2014) their abilities to those affordances. This vision is, in fact, consistent with many contemporary approaches to lan- guage teaching, including the “ecological approach” promoted by van Lier (2004), which sees the development of linguistic competence as a matter of promoting a relationship between the learner and the world conducive to the alignment of the resources available to learners and the abilities they have to make use of those resources.

Downloaded by [University of California, San Diego] at 16:02 12 March 2017 20  Rodney H. Jones The problem is that a lot of people (including many teachers and learners) see the affordances of language solely in terms of their ability to help them “make meanings” (rather than to help them take actions), or in terms of their ability to help them take actions that are not necessarily creative (like correctly answering questions on tests and examinations).As a result, the effective abilities we are help- ing our students acquire do not always easily align with the affordances language provides for creative action. In the remainder of this chapter, I will outline four affordances or “design features” (Hockett, 1960) of language that make it a good tool for creative action and four corresponding effective abilities that we should be helping our learners acquire so they can take advantage of these affordances.The affordances of language that make it an effective tool for creativity are that it is (1) rule governed, (2) ambiguous, (3) situ- ated, and (4) dialogic.The effective abilities that correspond to these affordances are (1) the ability to think“inside the box,”(2) the ability to“read (write,listen,and speak) between the lines,” (3) the ability to adapt our language to different circumstances, and (4) the ability to respond to the actions and utterances of others (see Table 2.1). Language Is Rule Governed It may come as a surprise that one of the most important affordances of language for creative action is that it has a lot of rules. The bulk of what we teach when we teach language is, in the words of Veale (2008, p. 63), “a solidified body of culturally received conventions, which fix the meaning of words and phrases and determine the contextual appropriateness of specific terms, topics and conver- sational strategies.” Conventions, of course, have a bad name among those who equate creativity with the unconventional.The truth is, however, that conventions are what make creativity possible in the first place. In her book Creativity From Constraints, Patricia Stokes (2005, p. xiii), maintains that the “creativity problem” is always both “strategic and structural”: it involves selecting appropriate constraints and working within them in novel ways. Perhaps the set of rules language teachers are most familiar with are the rules of grammar, but the problem is that most people teach them as constraints TABLE 2.1  Affordances of Language and Corresponding Effec- tive Abilities Affordances Effective Abilities Language is rule governed Thinking “inside the box” Language is ambiguous “Reading between the lines” Language is situated Adaptability Language is dialogic Response-ability

Downloaded by [University of California, San Diego] at 16:02 12 March 2017 Creativity and Language  21 (prohibiting certain kinds of utterances) rather than as affordances that allow us to do all sorts of creative things with language. One set of grammatical rules we find in English (and most other languages), for example, governs recursion.These rules allow us to place one thing inside of another thing and thus modify its mean- ing. For example: “This is the cat that worried the rat that ate the malt that lay in the house that Jack built.” Another set of rules is made up of those governing sequentially, the way what comes next in a sentence, a paragraph, a text or a con- versation is enabled by what has come before it.Thus, in English sentences, verbs usually come after subjects; in English conversations, answers usually come after questions; and in English stories, climaxes usually come after complications.Apart from these systemic rules, language also comes with all sorts of “set phrases,” for- mulae, and routines, both on the level of lexicogrammar (phrases like: “where in the world” and “neither here nor there”), and on the level of discourse (exchanges like: A: How are you? B: Fine, and you?).What all this actually means is that lan- guage provides us with a whole range of ready-at-hand ways of saying things and combining elements that we don’t have to create from scratch but that neverthe- less allow us to build all sorts of inventive utterances (see also Ellis, this volume). One especially good example of this can be seen in Tagg’s (2012) study on creativity in text messages. Of course, all of us are familiar with the inventive ways people play with spelling and typography in text messages (substituting “u” for “you,” for example, and using abbreviations like LOL).What is interesting about Tagg’s study is that among the most frequent forms of creativity she found was the inventive manipulation of “fixed phrases” such as “see ya not on the dot,” “thanks lotsly,”“Don’t give a flying monkeys wot they think,” and “Big brother’s really scraped the barrel with this shower of social misfits.”What makes set phrases such good tools for the exercise of creativity,Tagg notes, is their very predictability. Pennycook (2007) similarly argues that creativity emerges not from the entirely original but from a balance between the unique and the predictable. One of the key ways the rule-governed nature of language facilitates creativity is by giving us rules to break. Rules provide a necessary matrix against which the violation of them becomes meaningful. In fact, a surprising amount of the meaning we make with language is made not by following rules but by violating them in creative ways.As Dascal (2004) points out, A particularly significant feature of the pragma-rhetorical component of a linguistic system is that it sometimes achieves its aims by resorting to explicit violations of the system’s rules—be they the algorithmic ones (as in metaphor, puns, and nonsense poetry) or the heuristic ones (as in conversa- tional “implicatures”). (p. 48) Sometimes this takes place on the level of grammar:Apple’s advertising slogan “Think different,” for example, subtly reminds us, through the unconventional

Downloaded by [University of California, San Diego] at 16:02 12 March 2017 22  Rodney H. Jones (incorrect?) formation of the adverb, of Apple’s unconventional way of thinking, and Adidas’s “impossible” sentence—“Impossible is nothing”—reminds us that nothing is impossible. It is important to stress that these violations of the rules of grammar are not random but considered efforts to play with convention. Even breaking rules is, in a sense, rule governed. An even more common form of creative rule breaking, however (but one rarely addressed in language classes), occurs on the level of pragmatics though the various ways we “flout” the conventions of conversation in order to accom- plish particular actions and enact particular relationships with the people with whom we are speaking (Grice, 1989). It seems, in fact, that a lot of what we do with language is done by making meanings that are somehow contrary to those we are expected to make. When someone says, in response to the state- ment, “Everybody’s counting on you,” “Thanks, that really takes the pressure off,” she is neither showing gratitude nor indicating that she feels less pressure. Quite the contrary. And when somebody responds to a question with a ques- tion like “Is the Pope Catholic?” it is unlikely that he is interested in talking about theology. In short, language is “a rule-based system that employs different kinds of rules and does not rule out but rather permits and even exploits the violation of its own rules” (Dascal, 2004, p. 48). Despite popular opinion to the contrary, then, helping students master the “rules” of a language (be they grammatical, phonological, or discursive) is in no way contrary to the project of promoting creativity (though, of course, it depends a great deal on how this is done; see Ellis, this volume). In fact, mastering the rules is a precondition of being able to use language creatively. In other words, an important part of learning how to think “outside the box” is learning to think “inside the box.” Form-focused language work such as substitution drills, therefore, may not be entirely out of place in a “creative” language classroom (Cook, 2000), as long as the focus of such drills is not only to produce the “right answer” but also to play with the kinds of special meanings that might be produced when the “wrong” words, phrases, or forms are chosen to fill certain slots.This is, after all, the kind of game that many poets play, and poems themselves can serve as good examples for learners of both the rule-governed and the flexible nature of language. Learners can also be made more aware of rules and creative ways to break them on the level of discourse. Many dialogues in language textbooks are good at teaching people the conventional ways of interacting in conversations: “what we say when the other person says X.” This is the reason that many of them are so boring (and sometimes unauthentic sounding). But they can also provide useful templates for learners to explore the consequences of saying the “wrong” thing: What would be the consequences on the conversation if Mary chose not to accept John’s apology or the salesperson said something other than “Thank you,” or a character in a dialogue responded to a question with an utterance like “Is the

Downloaded by [University of California, San Diego] at 16:02 12 March 2017 Creativity and Language  23 Pope Catholic?”Would it make sense? How would it change what the people in the dialogue are doing and the kinds of people they are being? Language Is Ambiguous The second fact about language that makes it such a good tool for creativity is that it is such an imperfect means of conveying meaning. Language is, by its very nature, ambiguous. Not only does language come with, as Dascal (2004, p. 50) says, “a wide variety of syntactic, semantic and pragmatic means” for expressing “indefiniteness, ambiguity, polysemy, unspecificity, imprecision and vagueness,” but even when we think we are being clear, the people we are talking to almost always have to draw inferences from what we have said.“How are you?” is rarely really a request for information, and “We must meet up for lunch sometime” is often not really an invitation. Although this lack of precision might seem at first like a design flaw of language, ambiguity is actually one of language’s most impor- tant “design features.” The ambiguity of language, of course, is at the heart of much surface-level lin- guistic creativity (like punning and jokes). A good example is the political poster produced by the ad agency Saatchi and Saatchi for the British Conservative party in 1978 that showed a long line of people waiting at the unemployment office under the slogan labour isn’t working, meaning both that too many people (labour) were unemployed (not working) and that the politics of the current government (a Labour government) were not effective (not working). Ambiguity is also a key feature of much of the great poetry in the English language, as the eminent literary critic William Empson pointed out in his classic Seven Types of Ambiguity (1966).Ambiguity is what allows the meaning of a poet’s lines to expand in mul- tiple directions. Finally, ambiguity is an essential part of effective communication at the level of pragmatics. In fact, as George Yule (1996, p. 1) points out, the whole point of the study of pragmatics is to examine how very often in social interaction “more gets communicated than is said.” Recently, for example, Queen Elizabeth was reported to have said to a friend, regarding the vote for Scottish independence, “I hope people will think carefully about the future.” Although there is nothing particularly inventive or poetic sounding about this sentence, it does constitute a creative way for the Queen to express her opinion on a matter about which she is constitutionally required to remain neutral in a way that both sounds innocuous and implies a fairly clear view on the matter. “Pragmatic plasticity,” the potential of people to use language to either underspecify or overspecify their actual mean- ings, according to Hoefler (2009) does not only contribute to the effectiveness and efficiency of linguistic communication (see also Piantadosi et al., 2012) but has also played a key role in the evolution of language as a tool for maintaining group relationships.

Downloaded by [University of California, San Diego] at 16:02 12 March 2017 24  Rodney H. Jones The ambiguity of language makes it possible for speakers to “laminate” differ- ent communicative goals onto a single utterance, sometimes allowing them to hint at things they do not wish to say directly or to say more than one thing at one time (perhaps directed at more than one person present in the conversation). Strategies of pragmatic ambiguity include openly meaning one thing but at the same time communicating a second, more hidden meaning and making available more than one possible meaning as a way to “test the waters” when one is uncertain how the other person will react. Listeners can also make creative use of ambiguity by treating an utterance as ambiguous even when it might not have been intended that way by the speaker or by interpreting an utterance in ways that fit their own purposes (“But you said I could drop by anytime!”). As Sawyer (2001, p. 43) puts it, “some of the most creative aspects of conversations are on the hidden or implicit level.” Nerlich (2009) goes so far as to posit a new “Maxim of Manner” to supplement the one already proposed by Grice (“be as clear as possible”), one that accommodates the central function of ambiguity in communication. She writes, in ordinary conversations, speakers often put much more into their utter- ances than is obvious from the surface of the sentence, and hearers generally take out much more than is presented to them on the surface. To under- stand this multiplication of meaning, another Maxim of Manner should be introduced, according to which we have to “be conspicuous” and therefore “relish ambiguity.” (p. 114) Teaching people to “read between the lines” and to exploit the creative poten- tial that the ambiguity of language offers is not an optional “add-on” for lan- guage teachers: it cuts to the very core of developing communicative competence in learners. Unfortunately, pragmatic competence is one of the least frequently taught aspects of language use. Some, like Bouton (1999), advocate the explicit teaching of pragmatics, introducing to students a set of strategies for disambiguat- ing (and “ambiguating”) utterances. Often, however, it is enough to create tasks for students (both spoken and written) in which indirect communication can be seen to have a clear strategic advantage (certain kinds of role plays, games, and business simulations work well for this). Sensitizing students to the fundamental ambiguity of language and helping them feel more comfortable with the fact that people don’t always mean what they say or say what they mean can have a posi- tive effect on their language learning in general: Multiple studies (see, for example, Chapelle & Roberts, 1986; Ely, 1989) have shown “tolerance of ambiguity” to be a key characteristic of successful language learners. Language Is Situated The third design feature of language that makes it an effective tool for creative action is that language is always situated (see also Gee, this volume). What this

Downloaded by [University of California, San Diego] at 16:02 12 March 2017 Creativity and Language  25 means is that anything we say takes at least part of its meaning from the context in which it is said. In other words, meaning (and doing things with words) does not depend entirely on the words but also on the ways words interact with where, when, and to whom they are uttered. Utterances whose propositional meanings seem, on the surface, very clear, such as “I love you” or “give me a break,” can actually have wildly different meanings depending on whom they are spoken to and under what circumstances. “Do you know what time it is?” for instance, has a different meaning when spoken by one stranger to another on a train and when spoken by a teacher to a pupil in a kindergarten classroom. Communicating effectively, then, involves a process of fitting words and social contexts together and responding creatively to “the potentials and limitations of different social con- texts” (Tusting & Papen, 2008, p. 6). A lot of being creative with language, then, is not about creating new utter- ances but about creating new or effective language–context combinations, com- binations that are not just “appropriate” but also effective for getting things done or managing interpersonal relationships. As Pennycook (2007) reminds us (see also Tagg, 2012), much of linguistic creativity is not so much about reformulating language as it is about recontextualizing it. But there is another side to the situatedness of language that also has an impact on its creative potential: the fact that language is not only situated but also situat- ing.That is, while we use language in specific situations, we also use language to create those situations. Interactional sociolinguists like Deborah Tannen, drawing on the work of Goffman (1974), call the process by which people create situations when they talk “framing.” Framing is the way we show “what we are doing” in our interactions (e.g., complaining, joking, flirting).While physical contexts (like classrooms and hospitals) are fixed, imposing all sorts of constraints on what we can say in them, interactional frames are flexible, allowing us to use them in all sorts of imaginative ways to subtly redefine the situations that we find ourselves in. In a very interesting article called “Talking the Dog,” for instance,Tannen (2004) shows how family members often use the frame of “talking to the dog” to actually talk to other family members when they feel uncomfortable saying things to them directly, and every teacher knows the dramatic effect that reframing a classroom task (as, for example, a game or a test) can have on the ways students respond to it. The key effective ability students need to develop to take advantage of the situatedness of language is adaptability, which includes not just the ability to adapt their language to different situations but also the ability to adapt those situations through language, to reframe and transform them. Developing these skills in stu- dents, of course, depends a lot on how adaptable teachers are. Often the range of contexts made available to students in language classrooms is rather narrow, and the tasks we give to students don’t always seem to have much to do with the situations in which they are performed or make available many opportunities for creative reframing. Being a “creative” teacher does not necessarily mean inventing outlandish new contexts in which our students can pretend to be communicating

Downloaded by [University of California, San Diego] at 16:02 12 March 2017 26  Rodney H. Jones (such as desert islands or nuclear holocausts) but, more importantly, involves help- ing students to understand the richness of everyday contexts and the potential language has for transforming them. Language Is Dialogic What I mean when I say language is dialogic is that it always responds to some pre- vious language and anticipates some future language.This is an affordance because it allows us to do things together: Through language, we can work together to create conversations, activities, relationships, and societies. The challenging part of this is that what I am able to create always depends somehow on the person I am talking with, and the same for him or her. When I say something, I’m not just creating my own utterance, but I am also creating a “slot” (Schegloff & Sacks, 1973), which determines what the other person can say in return, and what they say, by the same token, enables and constrains what I’m able to say.This creative reciprocity is aptly captured by Erickson (1986, p. 316) when he likens having a conversation to “climbing a tree that climbs back.” Unfortunately, many approaches to language that focus on linguistic forms conveniently ignore this fact, treating sentences and utterances as if they were somehow independent of other sentences or utterances. To do this, as Bakhtin (1984) pointed out, is to ignore the “addressivity” of all linguistic production, which, for him, represented the chief source of creativity in any dialogue between two people. It is this “addressivity,” the fact that whatever I say must respond to what others have said and must demand some kind of response from them, according to Bakhtin (1986, p. 167), that makes language (and, by extension, thought and action) capable of genuine “unexpectedness . . .‘surprisingness,’ abso- lute innovation, miracle, and so forth.” While many conversations can be seen to follow fairly predictable “scripts” (such as ordering at a fast food restaurant or asking for directions on the street), most conversations (at least those of any real consequence) are more like improvisations than scripted plays.This is the point Sawyer (2001, p. 5) makes when he says that “in everyday conversations we are like actors without scripts,” forced to create our con- versations as we go along. Even in familiar situations, we still need to negotiate all sorts of aspects of our interactions such as what we will talk about, when turn taking will occur, and who has the right to speak at certain times about certain things.The goal of any good conversationalist, says Sawyer (2001, p. 22) is to find in situations what he calls the “improvisation zone,” the range of options for creative responses that is opened up by the situation and by what the other person has just said. Of course, it is also possible to narrow this zone, to “stick to the script,” and to avoid unpredictability, which is what many learners try to do.The result is that they do not just restrict what they are able to say with language but also what they are able to do with it, the kinds of relationships they are able to form, and

Downloaded by [University of California, San Diego] at 16:02 12 March 2017 Creativity and Language  27 the kinds of identities they are able to perform. Unpredictability in conversation is what makes conversations worth having in the first place. Language teachers are accustomed to seeing this in terms of “information gaps” (Doughty & Pica, 1986), but the value of unpredictability goes far beyond the practical need to search for missing information. Leech (1983, p. 146), in fact, suggests that underlying all communication is what he calls the “Interest Principle,” the principle “by which conversation which is interesting, in the sense of having unpredictability or news value, is preferred to conversation which is boring and predictable.” The real value of unpredictability in conversation, however, is not that it makes conversations more interesting but that it is the main source of new ideas and inventive actions. We do not just talk together; by talking together, we also think together (Littleton & Mercer, 2013) and do things together. Creativity rarely emerges from a single consciousness but rather, it occurs “like a spark between people through the synergy between utterance and response, and through the cumulative criss-crossing chains of utterances and responses which link people together” (Maybin, 2011, p. 129). The effective ability required to take advantage of the dialogic nature of lan- guage is what I call response-ability, that is, the ability to respond to and build upon the utterances of others, even when (especially when) they are unpredictable. Response-ability involves not just being able to “think on one’s feet” but also to make effective contributions to the ongoing “collaborative emergence” (Sawyer, 2001) of conversations, activities, and social relationships. Participants in “real” conversations (that is, conversations that move beyond “scripts”) can never be sure of how what they say will be interpreted and what they will have to respond to in the next turn: Utterances gain their meaning and pragmatic force only within the flow of discourse. What this obviously means for language teachers is that we need to give stu- dents more opportunities to genuinely respond to utterances that they care about. When students think of having a conversation as following a script rather than engaging in “improv,” they severely limit their opportunities to develop the abil- ity to respond creatively. It’s a popular assignment in secondary English classes in Hong Kong to send students out into the street to interview tourists. From time to time, I am accosted by these bands of clipboard-carrying students, who some- times run into trouble because of their desire to stick with the script rather than to respond to what I have said. Such conversations usually go something like this: Student  How long are you staying in Hong Kong? Me     I’ve lived here for 20 years. Student  I see.Which hotel are you staying at? The problem here is not just that the students are not paying attention. The real problem is that they don’t really care how long I have stayed in Hong Kong

Downloaded by [University of California, San Diego] at 16:02 12 March 2017 28  Rodney H. Jones or where I live. My answers to their questions are just items for them to write in the blanks on their worksheets. In a sense, they are exercising response-ability, but what they are responding to is not me—it is the worksheet. The best way to nurture response-ability in learners is to expose them to utter- ances, people, and problems that are worth responding to, creating conditions for them to engage in conversations that have some kind of consequence. This can only be done through creating activities that “push the boundaries of experience along with the language boundaries,” activities in which “learners can develop a sense of true self-other dialogue, and hence an identity and voice in the L2” (van Lier, 2004, p. 83; see also Chappell, this volume; Swain, 2000). Getting learners to see mastery of a language as a matter of response-ability has an ethical dimension as well: It creates learning spaces in which participants are urged to listen to one another and to take responsibility for what they say. The central fact about the “addressivity” of language is not just that it makes conversa- tions creative but also that it makes us answerable to one another. Conclusion I conclude with the rather unsettling feeling that I have spent a lot of time in this chapter talking about the abilities learners need to cultivate to become creative users of language and not enough time offering concrete suggestions as to how we can help them do this. I’m sure, though, that readers will find plenty of ideas in the following chapters. My real purpose has been to argue that “creativity” is not an optional ingredient that we can bring in to “spice up” our language teaching, that it is instead an intrinsic aspect of language use that language teachers and learners cannot ignore. Creativity is at the heart of all successful communication, even seem- ingly mundane forms of discourse that might show little evidence of what we usu- ally think of as “artfulness.” Making our students into “creative” users of language is not about teaching them to write poetry or getting them to imagine themselves to be extraterrestrials or elves (though I have nothing against these activities). It’s about helping to develop in them the effective abilities to exploit the rich potential language affords for taking creative actions in their everyday lives.The 19th-century linguist Michel Bréal (quoted in Nerlich, 1990, p. 95) said that “Language is in its way a work of art, which has its own proper procedures and its professional secrets.” The best thing we can do for our students is to let them in on these secrets. Questions for Discussion 1. How does the description of the relationship between language and creativ- ity described in this chapter differ from notions of linguistic creativity focus- ing on language form or on particular characteristics of learners? Are there any overlaps among these different ideas about creativity?

Downloaded by [University of California, San Diego] at 16:02 12 March 2017 Creativity and Language  29 2. Think of some examples of how creatively breaking a rule can result in some kind of special meaning.You can think in terms of phonological rules, gram- matical rules, or discourse-level rules. 3. If language is ambiguous, how do we manage to understand one another? What would communication be like of people always said what they meant and meant what they said? 4. Language doesn’t just help us adapt to contexts; it also helps us transform contexts. Can you think of any examples of this? 5. What are some ways you can foster genuine, collaborative conversation in your classroom? What are some factors that might make it difficult to do so? Suggestions for Further Research 1. Collect a small corpus of examples of instances of creative rule breaking and ambiguity from the print media and the Internet (newspaper headlines and advertising slogans are usually good sources). Analyze the different linguistic strategies in the examples and the ways rule breaking and ambiguity function to create meaning and help the authors accomplish actions creatively. 2. Design a small study in which you test the pragmatic competence of your students by either presenting them with ambiguous utterances in context and asking them to interpret them or by presenting them with “difficult situa- tions” and asking them to generate creative, indirect ways to express meaning, References Austin, J. L. (1976). How to do things with words (2nd ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bakhtin,M.(1984).Problems of Dostoevsky’s poetics.Minneapolis:University of Minnesota Press. Bakhtin, M. (1986). Speech genres and other late essays.Austin: University of Texas Press. Barron, F., & Harrington, D. M. (1981). Creativity, intelligence, and personality. Annual Review of Psychology, 32, 439–476. Bouton, L. F. (1999). Developing non-native speaker skills in interpreting conversational implicatures in English: Explicit teaching can ease the process. In E. Hinkel (Ed.), Cul- ture in second language teaching and learning (pp. 67–69). Cambridge: Cambridge Univer- sity Press. Carter, R. (2004). Language and creativity:The art of common talk. New York: Routledge. Chapelle, C., & Roberts, C. (1986).Ambiguity tolerance and field independence as predic- tors of proficiency in English as a second language. Language Learning, 36(1), 27–45. Chomsky, N. (1965). Aspects of the theory of syntax. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Clark, H. H. (1996). Using language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cook, G. (2000). Language play, language learning. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1988). Society, culture, and person: A systems view of creativity. In R. J. Sternberg (Ed.), The nature of creativity (pp. 325–339). New York: Cambridge Uni- versity Press. Dascal, M. (2004). Language as a cognitive technology. In B. Gorayska & J. L. Mey (Eds.), Cognition and technology (pp. 37–52).Amsterdam: John Benjamins.