Creativity and Digital Literacies in English for Specific Purposes

Abstract

The affordances of networked digital media to easily create, publish and share content have provided an environment within which creative practices have flourished. A “participatory culture” has emerged, empowering individuals to be involved in the amateur creation and sharing of culture. In addition, the resources available for text creation have expanded to include new, multimodal and hypertextual forms of representation, frequently combined in creative, hybrid ways. As a result of these changes, some language and literacy scholars have called for the development of pedagogies taking “digital literacies” into account. This chapter examines how digital practices might be leveraged in order to promote creativity in the context of higher education. It refers to a creativity enhancing learning environment, an English for science course at a university in Hong Kong. On this course, second and foreign language learners were engaged in an “English for science” project and created a digital video, shared through YouTube, as well as a more traditional text type, a written scientific report. The chapter examines students’ perceptions of these two tasks as they relate to creativity and suggests that, in order to promote creativity, both a “context for creativity” and “resources for creativity” are required.