7

OTHER LEARNER
CHARACTERISTICS

At the core of our revisitation of The Psychology of the Language

Learner is the question of progress: To what extent can the field
maintain continuity with past theory, and at what point does a break
become necessary (if at all)? So far we have looked at the four
canonical language learner IDs and considered the various pressures
to change from within the established ID framework. In this chapter, we
turn our attention outside that canonical framework and examine five
con
cepts that were assigned to the catch-all category of ‘other learner
characteristics’ in the 2005 version of our book. These were the
‘outsiders,’ the awkward pieces that did not quite fit the classic modular
framework upon which that book was based. Nonetheless, all five
constructs have been regarded as key features of learner psychology,
and in some ways these ‘other characteristics’ may turn out to be
particularly intriguing and instructive in the context of our revisitation.
Following the overall practice of this volume, we maintain the original
struc ture of the 2005 version in this chapter by centering the discussion
around the same five learner characteristics: creativity, anxiety,
willingness to communicate, self esteem, and learner beliefs. As we
shall see, what emerges from these overviews are five very different
story lines; when looked at in isolation, each story provides an
up-to-date account of how thinking about the particular concept has
developed in recent years; when considered together, the combined
narrative tells us a great deal about some of the ways in which the field
as a whole is developing.

Creativity
The first of the ‘other characteristics’ we discuss is creativity. It refers to
one of those grand psychological constructs that both professionals and
laypeople seem to understand but which no one can unambiguously
define. Although creativity
Other Learner Characteristics 171

overlaps traditional ID categories, it has long been associated with

intelligence in particular, as one of its major constituents; for example,
we saw in Chapter 3that Sternberg’s (2002) theory of successful
intelligence posits creative intelligence as one of three core factors.
However, creativity extends beyond the intellectual domain; as
Sternberg explains, “Sources of individual and developmental dif
ferences in creative performance include not only process aspects, but
aspects of knowledge, thinking styles, personality, motivation, and the
environmen tal context in which the individual operates” (p. 29). Indeed,
many personality theories include a prominent creativity component (for
a review, see Kaufman & Sternberg, 2006).
So what exactly is creativity? In a review of the literature, Simonton
(2008) suggests two key prerequisites: originality and adaptiveness.
Feldhausen and Westby (2003) define the originality dimension as
follows:

Creativity is the production of ideas, problem solutions, plans,

works of art, musical compositions, sculptures, dance routines,
poems, novels, essays, designs, theories, or devices that at the
lowest level are new and of value to the creator and at the highest
level are recognized, embraced, honored, or valued by all or large
segments of society. Between the lowest and high
est levels is a continuum of more or less recognized and useful
creative productions, but always the production is new, novel, or
unique relative to some definable context.
(p. 95)

Adaptiveness is concerned with the capacity to “provide the solution

to some significant problem or achieve some important goal”
(Simonton, 2008, p. 680), and it refers to the capacity to adjust behavior
to a particular situation. Adaptive ness is also what enables us to
distinguish between, say, an avant-garde piano composition—a creative
endeavor—and the noise made by an infant aimlessly hitting the keys
of a piano.
Creativity and Learning
Chamorro-Premuzic (2011) explains that within the increasingly complex
con temporary world, characterized by rapid technological advances,
adaptation to the constantly changing environments is crucial, and
creativity has been found to contribute to the required flexibility in this
respect. It is therefore a prereq uisite to lifelong learning, which,
combined with the fact that the concept is also related to the ability to
find original solutions to problems and to come up with new ways to
achieve goals, would appear to make creativity a key con cern of
educational psychology. However, as Plucker, Beghetto, and Dow
(2004) argued in a paper aptly entitled “Why isn’t creativity more
important to educa tional psychologists?,” the study of creativity in
education has not been nearly as
172 Other Learner Characteristics

productive as one would expect. One reason for this state of affairs is a
lack of agreement as to the appropriate focus of the study of creativity.
Simonton (2008) identifies three core approaches:

(a) The study of creativity as a mental process—the approach favored

by cogni tive psychologists interested in problem-solving skills,
primarily using labo ratory experiments.
(b) Creativity as product—looking at the qualities of products that meet
the cri teria of originality and adaptiveness, such as musical
compositions, writing, or inventions.
(c) Creativity and the person—usually the interest of personality
psychologists concerned with creativity as a trait that differs across
individuals.

Of course, there is overlap between these areas of inquiry, as we

might assume that creative products result from the creative mental
processes of a creative per son, but researchers tend to have their own
primary interest in one of these three areas. The lack of a singular
research paradigm and the crossing of traditional disciplinary
boundaries have long been seen as inhibiting the development of the
study of creativity (Sternberg, Kaufman, & Pretz, 2002): When a topic
straddles several subareas, a ‘you-first’ mindset can develop wherein
specialists in each area see that topic as belonging more to some other
field. Indeed, without the founda tions of any definitional consensus or
any clear-cut link to student performance, educational psychologists
have been reluctant to take the initiative for explora tions of the role of
creativity in learning.
Measuring Creativity
Several tests have been developed to operationalize creativity in specific
mea surable terms. Reflecting the variability in the understanding of the
subject mentioned above, some of these instruments focus on the
cognitive processes associated with creative thinking (e.g., the Remote
Associations Test), others look at the person behind the creativity (e.g.,
the Creative Persons Scale; Gough, 1979), and some examine the
products of creativity (e.g., the Consensual Assess ment Technique;
Baer, Kaufman, & Gentile, 2004). However, the best-known and most
widely used measure of creativity have been the Torrance Tests of Cre
ative Thinking (see Plucker & Makel, 2010), which involve a series of
tasks that can be scored for originality of the responses (how unique
and unusual they are), flexibility (how varied they are), and fluency (how
many unusual responses there are). Runco (2003) emphasized that
none of the three indices are all-important in themselves but should be
used in concert to describe the individual’s ideational profile: “Some
examinees are very fluent with ideas but relatively unoriginal or
inflexible. Others are high in originality, flexibility, or both, but only moder
ately fluent” (p. 34).
Other Learner Characteristics 173

As Simonton (2012) points out, the assessment of creativity has

tended to be very domain specific and the field has lacked a
measurement that cuts across all domains in the same way IQ is said to
work for intelligence. One promis ing move in this direction is the
Creative Achievement Questionnaire (CAQ; Carson, Peterson, &
Higgins, 2005), which assesses creativity in a number of domains as
diverse as scientific inquiry, creative writing, humor, music, and culinary
arts. Although the instrument is essentially product-oriented, scores on
this questionnaire positively correlate both with various cognitive and
person measures of creativity. Thus, the CAQ represents an instrument
based on the belief that it is possible to identify and isolate some core
aspect of creativity. However, Sternberg (2012) describes a very
different approach to the study of creativity, an investment-based
theory, which suggests that no such core aspect of creativity exists:

Creativity requires a confluence of six distinct, but interrelated,

resources: intellectual abilities, knowledge, styles of thinking,
personality, motiva tion, and environment. Although levels of these
resources are sources of individual differences, often the decision
to use the resources is the more important source of individual
differences. Ultimately, creativity is not about one thing, but about
 a system of things.
(p. 5)

Creativity in SLA
The 2005 discussion of creativity was influenced by the changing nature
of the provision of much language education occurring at the time. The
shift toward more student-centered, interaction-based, and open-ended
language teaching methodologies suggested a greater role for creative
learner thinking and behav
ior. At a similar time, Runco (2004) was reporting on studies that found
sig nificant differences between classrooms within schools in terms of
the level of creative thinking characterizing the students, highlighting
the link between the immediate classroom environment and the
emerging divergent thinking. These findings also indicated that student
creativity is inhibited by certain common classroom conditions and
tasks (e.g., test-like activities), whereas activities that are presented in a
“permissive and gamelike fashion” (p. 671) appear to release creativity.
The overall tone of the 2005 discussion of creativity was positive, and a
heightened interest in individual differences in learner creativity was
antici pated based upon the requirements for creative thinking implicit in
communica tive L2 learning activities.
In spite of the positive appraisal of the concept, however, the original
chap ter was only able to report on two empirical studies of creativity in
L2 learn ing (Ottó, 1998) and (Albert & Kormos, 2004). The assumption
underpinning the 2005 discussion was that these studies and their
findings of a significant
174 Other Learner Characteristics

positive relationship between creativity and L2 learner performance

would mark the beginning of a productive line of future research. Let us
review those two pioneering investigations.
Ottó’s (1998) study was concerned with how students’ creative
abilities affected learning outcomes; he adapted five subtasks from the
Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking (discussed earlier):

(a) Consequences—presenting students with improbable situations and

asking them to provide as many consequences as they could think of.
(b) Unusual uses—asking students to list possible unusual uses for
common objects such as a book or a pencil.
(c) Common problems—asking students to list a number of problems
that might occur in one of the following two everyday situations:
going to school in the morning or making a sandwich.
(d) Categories—asking students to list as many things as they could
 think of that belonged to a given category such as ‘things that are
red or more often red than not.’
(e) Associations—presenting participants with two words, for example,
‘mirror’ and ‘rain,’ and asking them to supply a third one that could
be semantically associated with these.

Students were encouraged to provide as many responses as they

could think of for each task in their L1. The scores of the five subtests
were correlated separately, and also as a composite, with the students’
English grades. The scores of the five subtests were correlated
separately, and, as a composite, with the students’ Eng
lish grades. All the intercorrelations between the subtests were
significant, but the correlation between total test score and English
grade was the highest ( r = .63), explaining roughly 40% of the variance
in the students’ grades.
Albert and Kormos’s (2004) study followed a task-based approach.
Their par ticipants carried out an oral narrative task and then filled in a
standardized creativity test developed for use in Hungary, examining
how three standard aspects of creativity— originality, flexibility, and
fluency—influenced a variety of measures of task performance. The
findings of Albert and Kormos (2004) showed that two components of
creativity, originality and creative fluency, were associated with some
measures of task performance, but no significant correla tions were
found between task-related variables and flexibility or the total creativ ity
score. Although even the significant correlations were moderate at best
(with the highest being 0.39), explaining approximately 10%–16% of the
variance in linguistic measures, and only six of the several correlations
computed reached statistical significance, Albert and Kormos
emphasized that except for complex ity and accuracy, all the
characteristics of task performance investigated in their study were
influenced by certain components of creativity. Thus, on the basis of the
results, the authors argued that the ability to produce original, novel
ideas in
Other Learner Characteristics 175

general does moderately affect how students perform on a particular

language learning task.

Summary
The 2005 discussion of creativity reflected an anticipation in the field of
more research and theoretical clarification of the concept in terms of
which aspects of creativity affect which aspects of L2 learning, and it
optimistically concluded that “creativity is certainly an ID variable to be
aware of in future L2 stud
ies.” However, this growing awareness has not been realized; in a
recent review, Albert (2012) concluded that “creativity has been almost
entirely neglected in the SLA field” (p. 145). What explains this neglect?
Albert mainly attributes the lack of scholarly interest to definitional and
measurement difficulties, and as we have seen above, it is certainly
true that creativity is a concept that has eluded precise definition and
which has been difficult to operationalize for research purposes.
Nevertheless, we have also observed in other parts of this book—most
notably in the discussion of strategies in Chapter 6 —that definitionally
imprecise concepts can still attract great interest. It seems that the
study of creativity in SLA has been a victim of the shift in thinking about
the psychology of language learning, a shift that moved away from the
classic, modular ID paradigm. The study of creativity—conceptualized
as a distinct ID factor—emerged precisely at a time when researchers
were looking for a new and different understanding of learner
characteristics, and the peculiar concept of creativity did not seem to fit
into any of the emerging new patterns and paradigms. This is unfortu
nate because the underlying thesis of the 2005 discussion of
creativity—namely that changes in language teaching methodology
have increased the relevance of creativity and thus made it a rewarding
area for research—remains valid. The main conclusion in 2005 was that
more research was required focusing on how creativity interacted with
other ID variables. Reframing this point in the light of McAdams’s New
Big Five approach, what is needed is paying greater attention to the
interface between an individual’s inherent creativity as a predisposition
and the external environment, as well as to the specific creative
adaptations people make in response to this interaction.

Anxiety
In stark contrast to creativity, anxiety is a concept that has consistently
attracted attention in L2 studies, and continues to do so. It was
relegated to the ‘other learner characteristics’ chapter in 2005 primarily
because of its lack of dis tinct disciplinary identity, as it cuts across
traditional ID boundaries: We have already encountered the concept in
Chapter 2as a key constituent of the Neu roticism/Emotional Stability
dimension of the Big Five personality model, and we came across it
again in Chapter 4 , this time as a component of Gardner’s