On the Teaching of Critical Thinking in English for Academic Purposes
The teaching of critical thinking is seen as a key component of many English for Academic Purposes programmes. There is a degree of uncertainty and confusion, however, first about how critical thinking is best understood, and then how our conceptualizatio
- PDF / 435,135 Bytes
- 17 Pages / 439.37 x 666.14 pts Page_size
- 48 Downloads / 204 Views
Abstract The teaching of critical thinking is seen as a key component of many English for Academic Purposes programmes. There is a degree of uncertainty and confusion, however, first about how critical thinking is best understood, and then how our conceptualizations of it might translate into coherent programmes for students. The chapter identifies three distinct strands of thinking about critical thinking in the literature: a skills approach, an ethics approach, and a “language of evaluation” approach. A critical discussion of these approaches is provided, alongside some recent empirical research into critical practices across a range of discipline areas. It is suggested that the framing of critical thinking curricula needs to be guided by a number of broad principles arising from this research, namely: that critical thinking typically takes in a variety of discursive practices; that the types of critical judgements students need to make are subject to a good deal of variation; that the quality of these critical judgements is strongly related to the degree of knowledge students have of the entities they need to consider. The chapter concludes with some practical advice about how these principles might be given effect in the design of English for Academic Purposes programmes, both in pre-sessional and concurrent contexts. Keywords Critical thinking • English for academic purposes • Disciplinary discourses • Generic skills • Critical theory • Evaluation • Knowledge
T.J. Moore (*) Office of Student Advancement & Swinburne Institute of Social Research, Swinburne University Technology, Melbourne, Australia School of Languages, Cultures and Linguistics, Monash University, Melbourne, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2017 R. Breeze, C. Sancho Guinda (eds.), Essential Competencies for English-medium University Teaching, Educational Linguistics 27, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-40956-6_2
19
20
1
T.J. Moore
Introduction
In an important article that appeared in TESOL Quarterly some 15 years ago – ‘A critical approach to critical thinking in TESOL’ – the author, Dwight Atkinson, noted an emerging interest in critical thinking within the teaching of English for Academic Purposes (EAP). Atkinson (1997) observed at the time that, whereas interest in the concept had previously been confined to L1 education contexts, the signs were increasingly there that the idea was beginning to take hold within “the realm of TESOL” (p. 71). While acknowledging the emerging influence of critical thinking within the field, Atkinson was keen at the time to sound a few cautionary notes. Chief among these was his concern that too many ready assumptions were being made about the nature of the construct, and that some versions of critical thinking being taken up in the profession appeared excessively “reductive and exclusivist” in their approach (p. 72). In short, Atkinson was concerned that the idea was being embraced by some in a less than “critical” way. One and a half decades on, it is fair to say that
Data Loading...
