Syntax Education and Development of Creativity

The English Syntax course is widely offered by English-related departments in Korea. As with other college courses, a fundamental issue regarding this course will be how to teach it. This issue should be considered against Korea’s current need for talented people with creativity. Its education sector is to explore how to produce such creative workforce. The revised 7th national curriculum aims at helping develop creativity in the secondary education. This paper assumes that the most efficient way to achieve this goal will be to design every school subject in a way that they will help develop creativity. For this to be possible, English teachers-to-be must be trained with a curriculum which will help cultivate their creativity. This in turn implies that English Syntax must be taught with the same goal included. This paper, first, shows that English Syntax is very feasible for creativity development. It then discusses how the course can be taught to foster the mental capacity. Finally, it reports results from the English Syntax course that the author taught in 2009 utilizing reflective essay writing and shows that there are signs that student creativity seems to have been spurred, with spacious rooms remaining for further improvement