Fostering creative language skills within PISA standards: bridging secondary school and university

Abstract

Background. Following the publication of the National Report on PISA results 2022 – which for the first time measured the level of creative thinking among Ukrainian adolescents – language teachers have renewed the discussion on how to teach and assess creativity in spoken language. There is a broad consensus that this is not only a school-level issue, but also a responsibility extending beyond schools to include universities that train future language teachers.

The aim is to present and discuss the results of an experimental training for university students majoring in language education. The objectives of the article are to structure the educational unit, analyse students' reflections generated through collective creative text production based on the PISA standard, and establish criteria and objectives for assessing creativity in language use among secondary school students, drawing on university students' training experiences.

Method. The research was based on the methodological principles outlined by Ellis, Guilford and Jones, using the LCS-15 model (Rački, Shen). The training was organized around the educational unit "Developing сreativity in language use" and focused on several key areas: analyzing creativity as a personal capacity manifested in speech; proposing criteria and objects of assessment for a scale measuring creativity in language use according to PISA-monitoring standards; and piloting students' creative text production alongside their methodological recommendations for fostering creativity in the speech of secondary school students. Fourteen master's program students specializing in teaching Ukrainian and English participated in the experimental training at Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv.

Results and discussion. In a series of classroom discussions, students critically examined the strengths and limitations of PISA assessments and explored potential correlations between spoken creativity and factors such as emotional intelligence, critical thinking, and multiple forms of literacy (linguistic, informational, media, and ecological). Their engagement in a PISA-style collaborative storytelling task using symbolic dice served as a catalyst for reflection on the theme "PISA Monitoring: Methodologies and Approaches to Stimulating Spoken Creativity." The discussion helped identify gaps in language education, particularly those contributing to students' underperformance in PISA-aligned speech tasks. Evaluation of the structured learning module revealed high student satisfaction, with 12 of 14 participants rating it as highly effective. Survey responses further indicated students' professional awareness of the challenges in developing spoken creativity and their perceived responsibility in addressing them. Key criteria and assessment targets for evaluating spoken creativity include: originality and novelty of ideas, linguistic proficiency and the ability to experiment with language forms and style, dialogic quality, structural coherence, and the integration of textual elements.