جسور المعرفة

The Role Of Short Stories In Enhancing Efl Learners’ Creativity

Auteurs : Smatti Said . Bousbai Abdelaziz .

Résumé

Short stories occupy a distinctive place among literary genres used in EFL instruction, valued for their brevity, emotional immediacy, and capacity to engage learners in a single sitting. This article examines, from a theoretical perspective, the role of short stories in enhancing creativity among EFL learners. Drawing on the pedagogical and literary-theoretical literature, it argues that the defining features of the short story, namely compression, emotional resonance, and focus on a single effect, make it a particularly effective vehicle for creative engagement. The article addresses three questions: whether short stories enhance learners’ creativity, which aspects of creativity they most cultivate, and how this process operates. It identifies and discusses six interrelated dimensions of creativity that short stories are argued to stimulate: imagination, originality, improvisation, introspection, creative communication, and critical thinking. Each dimension is examined through relevant scholarship and illustrated with classroom examples drawn from the researcher’s experience teaching literary texts to first-year LMD students at the English Department, Biskra University. Rather than presenting an empirical case study, the article offers a conceptual framework for understanding how short stories can be pedagogically exploited to develop EFL learners’ imaginative and innovative capacities, and argues for their systematic incorporation into the EFL curriculum.

Mots clés

Literary texts ; short stories ; creativity ; imagination ; innovation