Individual differences researchers have recently begun to investigate the concept of emotions and their role in language learning (MacIntyre, Gregersen, & Mercer, 2016). Our aim is to report on a project exploring English majors' feelings related to their use of foreign languages. Using a qualitative research design, participants were asked to write a paragraph in their mother tongue (Hungarian) describing their emotional experiences in connection with foreign languages and one of the four language skills. Our database comprised altogether 166 paragraphs from 31 male and 135 female students, with 43 texts on listening, 35 on speaking, 47 on reading, and 41 on writing. With the help of content analytical techniques, the texts were divided into thematic units and coded by the two authors. A framework of academically-relevant emotions (Pekrun, 2014) was used to guide our initial coding and the categories were modified where it was felt necessary. Results indicate that the two emotions most frequently experienced by English majors are predominantly related to enjoyment and language anxiety, and these emotions vary not only according to the skill involved but also depending on the context of language use (in class or outside class).

The aim of this article is to investigate the effect of creativity on performance in oral narrative tasks. Participants in the study were Hungarian learners whose creativity was measured with a standardized creativity test. We examined the relationships among 3 aspects of creativityoriginality, flexibility, and creative fluency-and different measures of task performance. The findings suggest that the 3 components of creativity have a differential effect on the measures of task performance. Creative fluency was positively correlated with the quantity of talk. Originality was negatively related to the quantity of talk, and positive correlations were found between originality and the complexity of narratives. The magnitude of the correlations indicates that creativity affects participants' output in narrative tasks only moderately.Many of the individual differences that exist among learners have been studied in an attempt to account for differential success in second language acquisition (SLA). The relevance of several cognitive, motivational, personality, and social factors has been revealed, but there is one complex phenomenon the We are grateful to Scott Jarvis for his advice concerning lexical diversity. Thanks are also due to the anonymous reviewers for their particularly thorough and thoughtful comments.

Methods of communicative and task-based language teaching often employ tasks that require students to use their imagination and to generate new ideas. These tasks might provide creative learners with more chance to practice and to produce more comprehensible output, which could lead to greater success in second language acquisition (SLA) (Swain, 1985). Therefore, creativity, which involves imagination, unconventionality, risk-taking, flexibility, and creating new classifications and systematizations of knowledge (Sternberg, 1985a), might be a potential factor that affects language learning outcomes. Despite its potential relevance, creativity has been a neglected individual difference variable in the field of SLA. Our study is the first attempt to examine the role of creativity in second-language oral task performance. Participants in the study were Hungarian secondary school learners of English whose creativity was measured with a standardized creativity test and who performed two versions of a narrative task. We examined the relationships among three aspects of creativity-originality, flexibility, and creative fluency-and different measures of task performance, which included the number of words and narrative clauses, subordination ratio, lexical variety, and accuracy. The findings suggest that creativity is best hypothesized as a multifaceted trait, as students scoring high on various components of creativity seemed to complete the same task in different ways. Students who invented a high number of solutions on a creativity test were found to engage in more talk; thus, in a foreign language setting, they might create more opportunities for themselves to use the language. The learners characterized by a higher level of originality tended to speak less and created more complex stories in terms of the narrative structure, but at the same time, they might deprive themselves of We are grateful to Scott Jarvis for his advice concerning lexical diversity. Thanks are also due to the anonymous reviewers for their particularly thorough and thoughtful comments.

No abstract

No abstract