Effects of the Customized Program for Middle School English Learners with High Ability: Focusing on Creativity and Coh-Metrix Analysis

Purpose: This study aimed to examine a program effectiveness, focusing on creativity and languagechanges after applying an English integrated curriculum model program developed for middle schoolEnglish learners with high ability. Methods: The customized program for middle school English learners with high ability was implementedfor 14 weeks with twenty students in the experimental class participating in the English Gifted andTalented Program. The same program was not applied to twenty participants in the control class,and the existing program was conducted as it had been previously. Before and after the program,a 30-minute narrative creative writing test was given to both sets of students to examine changesin creativity scores using a creative narrative rubric to measure creativity, and the writings producedby the students were then analyzed with the Coh-Metrix. Results: Among them, as a result of a paired-sample t-test using 28 before-and-after data from 14participants in the experimental group and 32 data from 16 participants in the comparison group, theoverall creativity score showed a statistically significant difference in the experimental group. Especially,image, voice, creativity, ideation, immersion and clarity were all significantly improved. In the controlgroup, only voice and ideation from the post-test were statistically significantly improved upon comparedto the ones from the pre-test. As a result of a paired-sample t-test on the measured values obtainedby analyzing the texts produced by the experimental group with the Coh-Metrix language tool, thenumber of words representing the amount of writing increased significantly, and the difficulty of thetexts shown in a reading readability index and syntactic complexity has increased. Although the typetoken ratio, which represents lexical diversity, decreased with a statistically significant difference, thefrequency of words that students felt familiar with was low, indicating that students' actual lexicaldiversity improved. Cohesion and narrativitiy did not change significantly in either group. Conclusion: The developed program not only aroused interest in understanding and using the superficialcharacteristics of language, but also interest in idea generation and creativity, inducing a high-level creativethinking process, and through this, it was concluded that the program was effective in improving creativityand English proficiency. These results have useful implications for the field of English education.