Poetry in Motion: The Dance Between Input Modality and Creative Tendency in Chinese EFL Learners’ L2 Writing

L2 poetry writing performance is shaped by both situational factors and learner internal traits. This study examined the impact of situational input modality (control, audio-only, visual-only, audio-visual) and learners’ creative tendency (high, low) on L2 English poetry writing. Sixty-five Chinese EFL learners wrote 260 English quatrains, assessed by ChatGPT across nine dimensions, including personal voice, audience awareness, organization, tropes, schemes, L2 linguistic conventions, thematic consistency, poetic creativity, and general writing quality. Results showed: (1) Input modality significantly enhanced multiple aspects of poetic writing, with audio visual input showing advantages across several measures, though statistical significance was largely confined to contrasts against the audio only condition; (2) Creative tendency alone had no significant effect; (3) A significant interaction effect revealed that audio-visual input enhanced poetic creativity, especially in low-creative learners, outperforming high-creative peers under unimodal conditions. These findings highlight the value of multimodal input, particularly for low-creative learners, and offer insights for L2 poetry instruction.