Neural foundations of creativity in foreign language acquisition

Abstract

This article focuses on the subject of several independent sciences, in particular linguistics and language didactics, as well as interdisciplinary research: the acquisition of creative foreign language competences. Whereas creativity is a very complex concept and very difficult to describe, it is most commonly explained with the help of examples. Due to recent technological progress, imaging methods are now able to show where creative activity, especially linguistic creativity, is located in the human brain and where it might possibly originate. The following article presents recently collected data from language acquisition-related neuroscientific studies in contrast to existing findings of language acquisition research as well as implicit language acquisition. Subsequently, all findings are used in order to draw conclusions about general as well as specific language didactics. In addition, a second goal is the demystification of apparently unproductive and unfocused states, which are wrongly stigmatised and unfairly seen as wasted time in institutionalised contexts. The results of this article, therefore, try to make those situations available again for goal-oriented foreign language acquisition.