Introduction

This chapter extends the theme of relationship building and language use explored in the last chapter, by exploring how creativity and language play in spoken language contribute to interpersonal involvement between speakers. In the context of spoken language, we see creativity as something which is achieved collaboratively by speakers, and thus it is highly relational. We start by reflecting on the relationship between language and creativity, moving beyond description in linguistic terms to reflect on the implications for pedagogy. It must be said that, while much research has been undertaken at the interface between language and creativity, less thought and less empirical investigation have been devoted to classroom applications. The ideas suggested at the end of the chapter, where we look at whether pedagogic strategies can be developed to make such language use more widespread in the language classroom, are necessarily tentative though we argue that they provide a strong basis for development. In discussing such moves from corpus to classroom, we also return to questions raised in our introduction about the role of native and non-native Englishes, the expectations surrounding different uses of English by different expert users and, in particular, we discuss what may happen to interpersonal relationships between speakers when different kinds of creative language use are mobilised.

Spoken language and creativity

We begin by examining a typical instance of language extracted from CANCODE and describe what is creative about it.