Philippine E-Journals

Stimulating Bilingual Students’ Divergent Thinking

Tiarma Marpaung

 

Abstract:

Bilinguals are claimed to possess divergent thinking indicated by having creativity. As candidates of teachers, students of

English Education should gain the quality of being creative so that the students can be interested in learning English. This

study tried to stimulate and reinforce the ability of divergent thinking of 35 English Education students of Artha Wacana

Christian University Kupang, Indonesia as they are from bilingual family. It also tried to find out the students’ level of divergent thinking ability using Gestalt and Jackson’s bucket test. It consisted of students from various ethnics of East Nusa Tenggara Province, Indonesia. Among 35 participants, only 14 were fluent bilingual students. Those bilinguals acquire their mother tongue as a first language and Bahasa Indonesia as a second language. The bilingual students can mention at least 3 to more than ten uses of the tin within 7 minutes. The result shows that 36% of the students have below average scores of divergent ability, 36% of them acquire average scores, and 28% of them are categorized as creative. Thus, it indicates that the students could not gain their maximum ability of divergent thinking which was possibly due to the qualities of their divergent ability. Uncomfortable environment, individual learning style, familiar use of the object, and lack of motivation have manipulated the students’ fluency, flexibility, elaboration, and originality in diverging their thoughts. Further research needs to be done to investigate those influencing factors deeply and more issues related to bilinguals’ divergent thinking.