A CASE STUDY OF ENGLISH LANGUAGE STUDENT TEACHERS’ CREATIVITY POTENTIAL

Abstract

Student teachers taking the Teaching of English as Second Language (TESL) program need to be creative in implementing the ESL curriculum in Malaysia. Creative student teachers can motivate school students to learn English Language creatively. In the past, boring language lessons had become a barrier to successful language acquisition. In this regard, the authors examined the creative abilities of thirty-two 1st and 2nd year TESL student teachers taking a Bachelor of Education course in a public university in Sabah, East Malaysia in term of their abilities to generate ideas via providing creative title with a short story. Creative potentials of the subjects were measured by a computer system. Findings revealed that 65.6% of the sample was in the moderate and creative category. Among the reasons identified in this study for producing fewer ideas in such activity were lots of reading (53.1%), the difficulty in predicting the outcome of the story (46.9%) and the lack of experience about the characters in the picture (56.3%). However, those who were found to be very creative were those who scored distinctions in English Language at SPM level („0‟ Level). Data also showed that higher English Language competency can improve creativity. The majority of the TESL student teachers surveyed also enjoyed the ideas generation activity and were thrilled to find out that such activity is able to improve their creative thinking abilities in language teaching, in particularly ESL. The researcher recommends that creative components be made an important element in future T & L activities.