ABSTRACT
The creativity involves novelty, imagination, adaptability, experimentation, and open-mindedness. Nevertheless, it is quite a difficult concept to tie down because it means quite different things when people talk about creativity as a trait, creativity as a product and creativity as a process. This chapter explores how the three senses of creativity can illuminate the way languages are learned and also argues that language acquisition is an inherently creative process that draws on the creative potential in all of the people and is manifested continuously and incidentally in novel utterances that display productivity and are also deliberately engineered for purposes of fun and enjoyment. It further examines creativity as a product showing how the process of combining new elements in new ways constitutes an essential feature of learner language. The chapter also considers language play; that it resembles the literary uses of language, in many respects it may be more closely related to person creativity.
