Creativity and Bilingualism

Art: “A Child’s Imagination” by Jeena Ann Kidambi
When children are little, they display high amounts of creative potential. They transform into royalty living in castles.They have fancy tea parties with a slew of imaginary friends. Their toys have fights as they imitate the heroic battles of yore between the proverbial good and bad guys. My own daughter used to ride her rocking horse to China to visit her invisible friend, Shope, with whom she would often have lengthy conversations through a phone, otherwise known as her hand.
What happens to this creativity as our children grow older? Science has demonstrated that creativity is a skill that is unlearned over the years. A seminal research study in this area was conducted by George Land in 1968, where he tested 3-5 year olds on creativity measures that he had used to test for creativity skills amongst engineers and scientists. While he found that 98% of 3-5 year olds had the creativity NASA was looking for, the longitudinal study found that only 30% of the same kids had those skills at 10 years of age, 12% as 15 years of age, and 2% as adults. Clearly, the students had unlearned their innate creativity.
While this is a fairly old study, we see the same trends today. And the impact is dire, especially considering that a recent Forbes study found that creativity is the most needed skill in the business world today. Creativity leads to more innovation, more problem solving, and more entrepreneurship. Creative endeavors not only belong to the arts and humanities but are necessary for furthering science, technology, medicine, and engineering. There are many suggestions on how we can reverse these trends, and one important one is by helping our students become bilingual.
Many studies have demonstrated that bilingual individuals possess more creative skills than monolingual individuals. There are many theories as to why this may be the case. Two major avenues through which bilingualism impacts one’s creativity is by impacting cognitive functions and by building open-mindedness through sociocultural competence.
First, the work required to suppress one language while speaking the other and vice versa may be promoting brain functions related to creativity. mainly cognitive control. Cognitive control is the ability to achieve goals in novel ways by having the flexibility to make changes, suppress unwanted behaviors, resolve conflicts, and learn from mistakes, skills that are automatically taught when students have to constantly switch which language they are using. Hence, having students practice both their languages daily will help students achieve higher levels of the cognitive control necessary for creative thinking.
Additionally, sociocultural competence, or the ability to work and play with those who are different than we are, may also be leading to greater creativity. By understanding the cultural contexts of both languages spoken, students become more open-minded to differing customs and ideas. This open-mindedness can naturally allow for students to explore novel ideas and solutions, whereas someone less open-minded may be more inclined to stay within the box. So it is important to not forget that third pillar of Dual Language Bilingual Education when teaching students language – sociocultural competence. It will help them be more creative in the long run.
Hence, programs that foster bilingualism such as Dual Language Bilingual Education and World Language programs are important, not just so that students can speak multiple languages but so that students are able to be more creative as adults and be the highly productive members of society we would like them to be.