The Effect of a Teaching Strategy Based on Synectics and Lateral Thinking on Developing Creative Writing Skills and Linguistic Fluency among Arabic Students

Abstract

One of the major goals of Arabic language education is the development of creative writing and linguistic fluency, but conventional methods of teaching do not always contribute to the higher-order thinking and creative expression in the university level. The paper will discuss the usefulness of an instructional plan that combines Synectics and lateral thinking to improve performance in creative writing and linguistic fluency in Arabic language students studying undergraduate courses at the College of Islamic Sciences, University of Baghdad. A research design that was applied in the second semester of the 20242025 academic year is the experimental research design. A total of 90 third-year students were used as a sample; half of them were in an experimental group and the other half was in a control group. The experimental group was taught with the help of the activities based on Synectics and lateral thinking, and the control group was taught with the help of the traditional one. The information was gathered through the creative writing test which measures originality, flexibility and fluency as well as a linguistic fluency scale comprising of 20 sub-skills. The independent samples t-tests and effect size measures analyzed post-test data. The findings show that, there are statistically significant differences that favor the experimental group in both, linguistic fluency (t = 26.385, p < 0.05) and the performance in creative writing (t = 10.971, p < 0.05). The analysis of the effect size indicated high instructional effects as Eta-squared of 0.549 in linguistic fluency and 0.796 in creative writing are significant. The results of these studies prove that the combination of Synectics and lateral thinking promotes cognitive flexibility, originality and fluent language production. The research comes to a conclusion that instructional approaches that are based on creativity can significantly enhance the outcomes of teaching Arabic language in tertiary institutions and justify their implementation in the language courses of university curricula and teacher preparation.