Revista simpozionului Eficienta si calitate in educatie 2018 Revista simpozionului | Page 6
CRITICAL THINKING ACTIVITIES FOR THE ESL CLASS
Cosmina Almăşan, Colegiul Naţional „Octavian Goga” Sibiu
Abstract:
st
Critical thinking is a 21 century transferrable skill that must be the focus of most learning activities
in school. It promotes the use of higher-order thinking skills, analyzing information and its sources
and finding solutions to problems. In the ESL classes, communicative language teaching must
encourage students to be inquisitive, to analyse arguments and points of view, to express opinions
based on personal understanding of the information they obtain from various sources. This paper
presents a series of activities which can be done with intermediate to advanced students in order to
develop and improve their critical thinking skills.
Key words: critical thinking, higher-order thinking skills, analyse, evaluate and compare, facts and
opinions
MOTTO: “Give the man a fish and you feed him for a day.
Teach a man how to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.” (proverb)
Critical thinking has been the buzz word in education for some time now, with a
myriad of definitions and equally many explanations as to why it has become an
important 21 st century skill. In a nutshell, however, the necessity to teach young
people how to exercise their mind in order to make sense of the tons of information
readily available online is unquestionable. This paper will take a look at some
theoretical aspects of the issue and then suggest some activities which can be
done in class for the purpose of developing the students’ critical thinking.
According to the NCTE Committee on Critical Thinking and the Language Arts,
quoted by Carrol Tama, this skill is “a process which stresses an attitude of
suspended judgment, incorporates logical inquiry and problem solving, and leads
to an evaluative decision or action.” Based on this definition, one might argue that
the skill enables those who possess it to reflect upon the information they are
exposed to in order to make a decision about what to believe and which action to
take.
Lee Watanabe-Crockett defines critical thinking as “more than just thinking clearly
or rationally; it’s about thinking independently […] formulating your own opinions
and drawing your own conclusions […] seeing the connections between ideas and
being wide open to other viewpoints and opinions.” She also points out that this
must happen free of outside influence, hence the emphasis on independent
thinking.
These definitions and interpretations point towards the fact that in order for
anyone, students included, to be able to understand the world around them and to
bring their own contribution to it, they must learn how to think critically. Teachers
are no longer the know-all source of information and if we teach the children
everything we know, then their knowledge will be strictly limited to ours. Like every
commodity that is in full supply, knowledge is nowadays losing its importance–
what matters is what we can do with that knowledge, how we can distinguish
between fact and opinion, how we can select the most trustworthy sources and
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