1.2 Purpose

Therefore, the primary objective of this experiment is to find out positive approaches to improve the writing class, which are beneficial to cultivate students' creative thinking. Through the analysis of cases, the paper is to elucidate effects of the cultivation and drills on creative thinking in English teaching, especially in writing. Analyzing through the aspects of pedagogy, psychoanalysis and cognition, it is to explore a possible model or methods of teaching English writing to cultivate students' creative thinking in junior high schools. The original intention of this paper is not to find possible ways to help students get high grades in English writing, but to try to improve the writing class to help students enjoy writing and develop their minds.

1.3 Significance

We can take a horse to the water but we cannot make him drink. Similarly, it's really hard to focus students loving writing. Trough changing the traditional writing class, this study can help to change students' attitudes towards English writing. Once students are willing to accept writing and even love writing, they would practice more and express more, which will help them to master this language. Moreover, through the comparison among current teaching approaches and the explosion of the possible model of teaching English writing, English teachers can find out useful ideas or methods to improve their writing class. Also, it helps to make teachers pay more attention to the cultivation of students' creative minds.

2. Literature Review

2.1 Creative Thinking

    2.1.1 Explanation

The field of creativity exists today largely as a result of the pioneering achievement of Guildford (1950) and Torrance (1965), who viewed creativity as an ability to create a process of creative problem solving. Dennis saw creativity as the process of “making the familiar strange and making the strange familiar.”, while Amabile (1996) regarded creativity as “the production of novel and useful ideal in any domain”, which has been cited widely. Similarly, Sternberg (1999) defined creativity as a skill to turn unknown things into reality. Differently, Gilliam (1993) considered creativity as an act of making new connections among things. Although there is no authoritative literature can offer an explicit definition for creativity, because of different research methodologies, different research emphases, different criteria, different theoretical bases, etc, the majority of researchers pay attention to these four parts: creative process, creative product, creative person and creative environment (Brown, 1989). Many researchers agree that creativity refers to the generation of ideas or products which are original, valuable or useful (Sternberg & Lubart, 1995).