Creativity and the linguistic features of argumentative and narrative written task performance

Abstract

This study investigated the relationship between creativity and the linguistic quality of the output in L2 written argumentative and narrative essays produced by 95 Hungarian secondary school students at intermediate to advanced level of proficiency. Participants also completed a figural creativity test which was standardized and validated for the target sample. The creativity test assessed creative fluency and elaboration, the abstractness of title and resistance to premature closure of the figurative representations. The lexical sophistication and diversity, syntactic complexity and elaboration, and cohesion and coherence of the students’ writing was analyzed with automated natural language processing tools. The interrelationship of creativity and the linguistic features of the argumentative and narrative texts was examined using correlational analyses. The results reveal a complex interplay of the role of different facets of creativity in L2 written task performance that varies across the two types of tasks.