CREATIVITY
Can Learning a Foreign Language Lift Your Creative Block?
“A different language is a different vision of life.” — Federico Fellini
Ever since I was a child, I have found languages fascinating. Being young, I remember questioning where a word came from, or who first came up with the term ‘wheel’, or why that green unappealing food my mom was force-feeding me was called ‘spinach’. I still catch myself searching for explanations for words I have been using almost all my life, and I still test myself as to how many times I need to repeat, reread or rewrite a single word before its meaning becomes vague.
Even though linguistics was not the field I chose to study and deal with on a professional level, my curiosity remained in the form of a spark, making me push on and take up new languages. Living in different countries definitely made this a whole lot easier for me — if I truly wanted to experience the culture and learn everything I could from the locals, I had to be able to communicate with them in their mother tongue. I was amazed that it didn’t matter to them if I sounded like a 2-year-old who actually made more hand gestures to explain herself than the number of words she would say in a sentence — I was trying my best to speak their language, and that was enough.
But what about creativity? The role of creativity as the driving force of value in the career path I actually chose for myself — marketing, is undisputed, especially in today’s ever-changing marketplace that is constantly challenging us to find alternatives to the methods and strategies of yesterday. The job itself requires a strong focus on the crossing point between creativity and analytical thinking, an ability to balance right on the edge of this interface and to enable both pieces of the creative problem-solving puzzle: divergent and convergent thinking.
As described by Anne Manning, Founding Partner of Drumcircle LLC and Instructor at Harvard University,
“Divergent thinking is the process of coming up with new ideas and possibilities — without judgment, without analysis, without discussion. It is the type of thinking that allows you to free-associate, to ‘go big’ and to discuss possible new ways to solve difficult challenges that have no single/right/known answer,”.
Think of a brainstorming session where all sorts of ideas come on the whiteboard, most of which are usually way over the given budget, timeframe, or both.
Convergent thinking, on the other hand, is explained by Manning as being
“Associated with analysis, judgment, and decision-making. It is the process of taking a lot of ideas and sorting them, evaluating them, analyzing the pros and cons, and making decisions,”.
Now think of the funnel that sorts all the ideas previously put on the whiteboard and channels through only those who are actually feasible.
But more about those in some next article.
Creativity as such has been under systematic studies for more than 50 years, and it is still at the peak of attention, especially since it is difficult to define or quantify. And we all know that until researchers succeed in beating it with their measuring sticks, the ample attempts into delving deeper into the arena where ideas come from will carry on.
There are, however, some tools at our disposition that assess creativity in an individual, such as the Torrance Test of Creative Thinking (TTCT), created by Dr. E. Paul Torrance, the “Father of Modern Creativity” in 1962. The TTCT has since become highly recommended in the educational field and is even used in the corporate world.
The test itself is meant to measure the participant’s creativity on four different scales: fluency, flexibility, originality, and elaboration by assigning simple tests and exercises in divergent thinking and other skills related to problem-solving.
Using this same test, Behzad Ghonsooly and Sara Showqi from the English Department at the Ferdowsi University of Mashhad in Iran in 2012 did a study on The Effects of Foreign Language Learning on Creativity, published by the Canadian Center of Science and Education. Their study was aimed at comparing the performance of advanced learners of English as a foreign language and their early beginner counterparts on a measure of divergent thinking ability.
The sample consisted of 60 advanced English learners aged 16 to 18 who had been studying English for at least 6 consecutive years, and 60 monolinguals in the same age range. Going a step further, since the sociocultural and socioeconomic status have an influence on creativity, they made sure that all participants “had everything in common but the experience of learning a foreign language in language institutes.”.
What they came to conclude was that mastering a foreign language in the context of a classroom dramatically increases all four components of the divergent thinking ability measured by the TTCT. They attribute the outperformance of the advanced foreign language learners compared to the monolinguists to several aspects in which language learning affects cognitive functions.
The first way in which it affects creativity comes from the reasoning practices that are imposed on the brain itself by learning a foreign language, which are an integral part of the creative processes. Other authors, more focused on bilingualism, have shown that the mental practices connected to it raise the attention-control abilities used for planning, solving problems and performing various other mentally demanding tasks, which come out of the necessity to separate the unused language system in a given situation.
However, learning a foreign language may impose even greater intellectual changes as it is a bigger challenge to tackle the onerous tasks that learners take up in the classroom context. Additionally, as divergent thinking requires willingness and adaptability to change, a crucial component is the motivation in learners to change and adjust in accordance with the learning experience.
Language gives a deep insight into the culture where it is spoken, which is one of the reasons why learning a new language provides a challenge to get familiar not only with a new linguistic system, but also the cultural norms, customs, beliefs and meanings that are attributed to various aspects of life and which are diverse from our own, enhancing divergent thinking. When we learn the contextual meanings and stories behind the words in a language, we learn what a country’s priorities are and truly start to understand a culture, which gives us the opportunity to look at the world from a different and unique point of view.
For example, in Chinese culture, one’s family is one of the most important parts of life. It is a safety net and a support system that gives emotional meaning to things and makes the difference between a ‘home’ and a ‘house’. This strong family unity is beautifully reflected in the word for ‘everyone’, which is 大家 or dà jiā, that literally translates to ‘big family’.
And even though the number of words Inuit people use for snow has been a debate for linguists, the facts still stand that in different areas around the Arctic, people do use over 50 different words for it, each having a meaningful distinction from the others. The Inuit are not the only one adapting their vocabulary to their surroundings and valued possessions: the Sami people, who live in the northern tips of Scandinavia and Russia, use at least 180 words related to snow and ice, according to Ole Henrik Magga, a linguist in Norway. What they also have is as many as 1,000 words for reindeer, which clearly signals the important role these animals play in Sami people’s lives.
These examples are just a few from an array of different linguistic intricacies that demonstrate the way in which language fits the evolution of needs and ideas of cultures across the globe. The familiarity with different cultural contexts and the ability to experience 2 (or more) different linguistic and conceptual systems gives us the opportunity to establish different associations with the same idea, and create relations between seemingly irrelevant ideas from different categories, which is a feature essential to divergent thinking, and consequentially, creativity.
The flexibility, and simultaneous boldness and humbleness to openly face the idea that all of the words we already know are wrong in this new setting fosters creative abilities by means of engaging specific cognitive practices that this process brings. None of the phrases we use daily, none of the film or book quotes we know, or the slang that makes us feel like we belong to a certain group of people who share situations and interests, are of use when we first open the new textbook level A1 and the first thing we learn is (in most cases) the alphabet. Not to mention the sense of humor we so dearly hold as our special trait — we need to redevelop it in the new situation because merely translating jokes usually doesn’t cut it for anyone but ourselves.
Words are born in different environments, various points in time and throughout history, from dissimilar myths and (sometimes) unlike obsessions of a culture. If you can provide your mind with a whole new playground for your ideas, where they can take a swing and jump from it landing somewhere unknown, the new perspectives will surely crush whatever was standing in the way between where your mind is and where you want it to be. And if you are uncomfortable with ambiguity, maybe learning a new language can make you also learn how to sit back, relax and simply enjoy the wheels turn.
