By Yin Nwe Ko
In my article that was mentioned here a few months ago, I presented creative thinking in Education. In that article, I emphasized that thinking skill has not been popular in Myanmar until the beginning of the 21st century. Most teachers in Myanmar have already known four skills: reading, writing, listening and speaking. Now, almost every teacher becomes aware of the presence of thinking skills and their importance vividly. There are several types of thinking skills viz. convergent thinking, divergent thinking, critical thinking, creative thinking, etc. Among them, I would like to emphasize the third one in this article.
Critical thinking is a term used by educators to describe forms of learning, thought, and analysis that go beyond the memorization and recall of information and facts. In common usage, critical thinking is an umbrella term that may be applied to many different forms of learning acquisition or to a wide variety of thought processes. In its most basic expression, critical thinking occurs when students are analyzing, evaluating, interpreting, or synthesizing information and applying creative thought to form an argument, solve a problem, or reach a conclusion.
Critical thinking entails many kinds of intellectual skills, including the following representative examples:
• Developing well-reasoned, persuasive arguments and evaluating and responding to counterarguments
• Examining concepts or situations from multiple perspectives, including different cultural perspectives
• Questioning evidence and assumptions to reach novel conclusions
• Devising imaginative ways to solve problems, especially unfamiliar or complex problems
• Formulating and articulating thoughtful, penetrating questions
• Identifying themes or patterns and making abstract connections across subjects
Critical thinking is a central concept in educational reforms that call for schools to place a greater emphasis on skills that are used in all subject areas and that students can apply in all educational, career, and civic settings throughout their lives. It’s also a central concept in reforms that question how teachers have traditionally taught and what students should be learning — notably, the 21st-century movement, which broadly calls on schools to create academic programs and learning experiences that equip students with the most essential and in-demand knowledge, skills, and dispositions they will need to be successful in higher-education programmes and modern workplaces.
As higher education and job requirements become competitive, complex, and technical, proponents argue, students will need skills such as critical thinking to successfully navigate the modern world, excel in challenging careers, and process increasingly complex information.
Critical thinking also intersects with debates about assessment and how schools should measure learning acquisition. For example, multiple-choice testing formats have been common in standardized testing for decades, yet the heavy use of such testing formats emphasizes—and may reinforce the importance of — factual retention and recall over other skills. If schools largely test and award grades for factual recall, teachers will therefore stress memorization and recall in their teaching, possibly at the expense of skills such as critical thinking that are vitally important for students to possess but far more challenging to measure accurately.
Among many interesting and useful research, here is the one conducted by Dr Li Li who is the Associated Professor in Language Education and Director of M.Ed. in TESOL in Graduate School Education at the University of Exeter. My esteemed readers might enjoy reading and seeing what she emphasized critical thinking in education.
In her recent talk at a second language education conference, she asked roughly 100 attendees in the room, whether they have received training in critical thinking. Surprisingly, only a handful of people raised their hands. One might find this disappointing, given that the concept of critical thinking is so important in academic study. On the one hand, it might be true that very little systematic training is provided to second language teachers and learners. On the other, few teachers and learners consciously make the pedagogical link between language learning activities and critical thinking. Rather, they pay more attention to language form and function, such as grammar rules, lexical collocation, successful communication, and even pragmatism.
Also, many of these attendees might have perceived the concept as more closely related to STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Maths) subjects, rather than a language subject. In fact, her research finding suggests the majority of second language teachers do not believe critical thinking is associated with language learning. Teachers’ beliefs about integrating critical thinking in second language learning are one of the most influential factors towards the ack of in-depth exploration of the topic in the field.
Why should teachers integrate critical thinking into language teaching?
You all see an example:
In an economic undergraduate course, Year 1 students are required to discuss in a group whether the provision of grammar (academically exclusive state-funded) schools should be expanded from an economic perspective. In this discussion, students need to demonstrate the following skills:
In this task, it is evident that students need to demonstrate a good depth and breadth of understanding of the topic, conduct sound and consistent critical analysis, and present clear development of relevant arguments using a good range of sources.
It looks like these skills are not closely related to language learning. However, few would disagree that they use language to express themselves, collaborate, take a stance and solve a problem. There is an interrelated relationship between language and the thinking process. If we consider EFL (English as a Foreign Language is learning English in a non-English-speaking country) or ESL (English as a Second Language is learning English in a country where English is dominantly spoken or the official language) learners, in particular, they will see the significance of offering critical thinking skills in language learning because of the close connection between language development (e.g., the depth and breadth of vocabulary use) and thinking.
Thinking skills involve some micro-skills, such as analysis, reasoning, evaluation of materials and judgments, challenging assumptions and perspectives, and proposing new ideas and solutions. To enhance these skills, teachers can focus on the following:
• Deliberate practice of analysis: the usage of words, grammar structure, coherence of a paragraph, supporting evidence in the essay
• Evaluation of the stance-taking: find out the writer’s perspective, evidence, and biases
• Synthesis: compare and contrast several materials, arguments, and points of view
These are achievable through task-based or problem-based learning by creating more opportunities for collaboration. When students talk, they share and evaluate information. When the tasks are problem-oriented, students are more motivated to find a solution collaboratively, using the language as a tool to communicate, negotiate and present. Besides, this offers students a ‘thinking space’ to practice what they would like to say collectively.
A second thing that teachers can do is to improve classroom language use. My research suggests that students can develop thinking skills through teacher talk, especially when teachers ask meaningful referential questions, and a chain of questions before they provide feedback (Serial IRF: It means a teacher Initiation, a student Response, and a teacher Feedback.). So perhaps one of the things teachers can do is to adopt a meaningful Spiral IRF sequence, to not just focus on what, but how and why.
Finally, they know critical thinking is vital, and when they think critically about a matter, they don’t consciously think they are going to analyze or evaluate it. So once these subskills become part of language learning, students can use the language to communicate and collaborate more critically and effectively.
All in all, I have somewhat introduced the foundation of critical thinking to Myanmar teachers who are teaching English as a second language to Myanmar’s young citizens. For now, we can be able to guess whether we should teach critical thinking to my student very well.
Reference: Teaching Teen
