Enhancing Syntactic Complexity of EFL Learners' Essays Through Creative Thinking Skills

This study aimed at investigating the probable effect of teaching three divergent creative thinking techniques on both EFL students' creative thinking skill and syntactic complexity of their essays. For the purpose of this quasi-experimental study, 54 female undergraduates of English literature were selected from two intact writing classes at Alzahra University in Tehran. In addition to the regular writing class, the experimental group was taught three techniques, namely brainstorming, synectics and SCAMPER and the comparison group practiced process writing activities through an online tool named padlet. Abedi's creativity test (1996) coupled with two topics from the writing topics of TOEFL (Lougheed, 2004) were administered as pretests and posttests. Furthermore, syntactic complexity of essays was measured through Syntactic Complexity Analyzer (Lu, 2010). The result showed that practicing these techniques had a significant effect on improving EFL students' creative thinking skill and the syntactic complexity of their essays over time. Thus, material developers and teachers could benefit from the suggestions of this study.