Critical thinking in language teaching / Higher-order thinking skills

Higher order thinking skills in language teaching / learning. I'll be talking, just to give you a sort of preview of what this is going to be all about.

Um, some definitions, what is critical thinking, what is um, higher order thinking and so on, and terminology.

And then some reasons why we need to use higher order thinking skills in our teaching, um, some examples, activities, using higher order thinking skills in language teaching and learning, and finally, or nearly finally, um, critical thinking when using internet resources, which is more and more important for our students today, who are increasingly using internet resources in their, um, in their daily lives, um, and in learning.

So to start off with definitions and terminology then.

First of all, higher order thinking skills, or hots.

Um, those which involve some kind of mental effort.

We are trying to work out something rather than just remembering or recalling or identifying, which are lower order thinking skills.

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Um, and various classifications, some of you may know Bloom's taxonomy, um, of, um, cognitive, um, what do you call it?

Cognitive, um, cognitive skills or something like that.

Um, uh, and then there's the definition convergent versus divergent thinking.

Convergent thinking, coming to one right conclusion.

Divergent thinking, thinking of many possible different solutions or ideas, associated ideas as you can.

Um, critical thinking is becoming, uh, used a lot recently, and I'll be focusing quite a lot on that in this talk.

Um, uh, the ability to judge, really, critically, whether something is true or untrue, good, bad, and so on.

Uh, so it involves some kind of value judgment.

And creative thinking.

I'm going to focus mainly on the last two.

Critical thinking versus creative thinking.

Critical thinking being the process of thinking that questions assumptions.

This is Wikipedia.

But I I find Wikipedia really, really helpful.

Um, whether something is true, false, sometimes true, sometimes false.

Um, thinking critically, thinking for yourself.

Not just taking things for granted.

Um, or less elegantly, and I really like this phrase.

Crap detecting.

Crap detecting is is a a phrase I got from a book by Postman and Weingartner, called Teaching as a Subversive Activity.

Which is a really interesting title.

Um, uh, basically the authors are saying, one of the important functions of teaching is to get your students to think for themselves.

And one of the most important skills involved in that is what they call crap detecting, checking out if something is rubbish or whether it is true and worthwhile.

I picked this up in an article of my own.

A critical thinking entails all sorts of sub skills of thinking.

So it entails the ability of being able to distinguish between categories, to analyze things.

To think analytically.

Um, to be precise, um, to be, um, wary of being vague or overgeneral.

To identify things which actually contradict or are inconsistent or tautologous.

Tautologous, meaning saying the same thing twice unnecessarily.

Logic.

Really, really important.

Um, criticism and being able to apply criteria in order to judge whether something is right, wrong, worthwhile, not worthwhile, and so on.

Creative thinking.

On the other hand, is thinking up original solutions to problems.

Or creating new constructs of some kind, whether whether they are artistic or any other kind of work.

Uh, and it includes two basic categories I'm going to look at.

One is general creative divergent thinking, thinking up as many different kinds of solutions to a problem or responses to a cue as you can.

And the other is usually associated with the name of Edward de Bono, um, is what's called lateral thinking.

Which doesn't mean thinking up as many as you possibly can, but thinking up original solutions.

Thinking, as it were, outside the box.

And coming up with new ideas.

And both these kinds of divergent thinking, I think we can include in our teaching.

Why?

Um, uh, I think there are four main reasons here.

One is language learning.

Um, students will simply learn better if they're also thinking while they're learning.

Uh, second is intellectual development.

Most of us, or not most of us, but a lot of us are teaching, uh, teenagers and young learners.

Where we are one of a number of educators.

We're not just teachers of English, we're also educators.

Um, and one of our functions is to assist our students in their general intellectual development.

Not just learning the language.

Educational values.

Same thing.

I'm also an educator.

And finally, interest.

All things being equal, an activity which gets students to think a bit is likely to be a lot more interesting.

I'll give you some examples in a moment, than one that does not.

Language learning.

Um, new language items are better imprinted on our memory if we use deep processing.

I mentioned this in my previous talk.

Um, thinking about things a bit more deeply, not just the surface, but associating them, generalizing, exemplifying, analyzing, prioritizing.

All these things to do with higher order thinking, dealing with the new items, with the language.

Uh, in this way is likely to make the new language memorable.

And therefore it's good for learning.

Um, relating the item to its various meanings, to other items they've learned before.

Um, and obviously a higher order thinking skill.

General intellectual development.

The learning of facts and concepts.

I heard someone saying the other day.

Um, oh, we don't need to teach facts anymore.

We just need to teach students how to think.

But you can't teach people how to think if they've got nothing to think about.

And in order to have given something to think about, you also need to teach them facts.

I think that, uh, the teaching of facts, not and information is as important now as it ever was.

Even though you can look things up on the internet, you can't begin to look things up on the internet unless you have a basic body of knowledge yourself to start off from.

A jumping off board, if you like, a springboard.

And so the learning of facts and concepts is absolutely essential in education.

Plus the ability to relate these to one another.

Um, to criticize, to draw conclusions, and so on, and so on.

Um.

And then there's the educational values.

Um, and this is really important.

In a country which is a democracy.

Um, in a culture which encourages individual thinking and creativity.

The important ability and importance to think for yourself, as opposed to the unthinking acceptance of something that someone else has told you.

Um, encouraging our students to say, okay, an authority told me this, but I'm going to check it out myself as well.

And I think we need to encourage this.

It's it's part of my own, um, educational belief.

That one of our functions is to help our students to to think for themselves and evaluate what they are told.

Not just accept things unthinkingly.

Finally, just interest.

It's just a lot more interesting to do things that involve higher order thinking.

Um, than it is to do ones that do not.

Okay, let's start with the language teaching bit.

Higher order thinking skills in language teaching.

Let's look at critical thinking.

Let's look at a conventional vocabulary exercise like this.

This is lower order thinking par excellence.

All they need to do is identify which word goes with which picture.

Any any almost any matching exercise is likely to be lower order thinking.

Um, I'm not saying it's not useful, it is useful.

Lower order thinking in general is essential before you get to higher order thinking.

But, um, nevertheless, firstly, it's very, very basic.

Secondly, it's not terribly interesting.

The pictures are quite nice, but I don't think it scores very high on interest.

Have a look at this in contrast.

Here.

First of all, there's a lot more words.

But they are asked not only to identify what the word means, but also to categorize it.

To say what class of things it belongs to.

It's just a little bit more processing, a little higher, uh, higher order thinking skills.

And quite a lot more interesting to do.

So that's an example.

At a very, very basic level.

Um, and a point I want to make quite early on is that higher order thinking skills are not limited to upper school or to advanced learners.

They can be used at a very basic level like this.

Grammar.

Uh, I'll say with vocabulary.

So I haven't got to grammar yet.

Another matching exercise.

Matching.

A little bit more tricky this one.

But the fact that it's tricky doesn't necessarily mean that it's higher order thinking.

It's still lower order thinking.

It's just matching to a definition rather than matching to a picture.

Okay.

So one goes with.

Angry goes with.

D.

D.

No.

No.

A.

A is three, jealous, right?

So it's not, it's not necessarily that lower order thinking skills are easy.

They sometimes they're a bit tricky like this one.

But doesn't mean to say it's higher order thinking.

And it's definitely not very interesting.

Now, this is a review exercise.

We assume that if the students are able to do this, it means that they've already taken the word at least into short-term memory.

They know what it means.

If they didn't know what it means, they couldn't do it.

And they're just practicing.

So they're using words which they already know.

And consolidating their knowledge of their meanings.

Contrast that with this.

First, there's a little bit of choice.

Um, which I'll come back to when I'm talking about teaching mixed classes.

Because that's really, really relevant there.

Um, it says complete any three.

But what they are asked to do here is contextualize the words.

In their own experience.

I'm asking them to write or to say a sentence which relates to their own experience.

Putting the word into the context of an actual situation.

Um, so.

It's I felt angry because.

I'm thinking of when I felt angry.

And giving a reason for it.

And notice the conjunctions which are asking them to think about cause or effect or time.

In other words, they're also thinking logically about the connections between the two events.

I felt confident so, and so on.

Um, and this, I would say.

Not only leads to better learning.

It's activating higher order thinking skills.

And therefore it's also a lot more interesting to do.

A lot more fun to do.

What I actually do in the classroom is I say, I'm going to give you three or four minutes.

Fill in as many as you can.

You don't have to do them in the order they're given.

You can fill in as many as you can.

Um.

With, but it must be a sentence.

Saying something which is true for you.

It's actually happened.

Okay, I felt doubtful because.

And you have to say when, uh, why you felt doubtful.

And it has to be a real event.

And then after I see that most of them have filled in at least three, I ask them to share with each other.

And they're getting a lot of practice using the new word in different contexts.

They're hearing it in all sorts of different contexts.

Whereas the previous one just gave one definition for each and that was it.

So this is altogether a richer exercise.

And the key difference is the amount of thinking and thinking skills that are going on here.

Conclusions then.

Use of higher order thinking skills in language teaching materials contribute to good learning and are important.

However.

They can only be activated if students know facts and use also lower order thinking skills.

Um, and I think we can encourage students in exercise, language exercise, all sorts of kinds to use higher order thinking skills.

Um, and to have use a critical approach to reading or listening texts from word level upwards.

Um, this means checking for logic, consistency, evidence, and so on.

Um, and critical thinking is crucial when approaching material accessed through internet sources.

And students should be encouraged to be on the lookout for distortions, illogical argument, gaps, contradictions, and lack of evidence.

And aware that news or information pages may sometimes be fake news or advertorials.

Thank you.

Okay, any questions?

Okay.

Books.

Printed.

Electronic books.

Okay.

So this is it for the second day.

Thank you so much for coming for today.

We are going to meet tomorrow at 11:00, and the registration opens at 10:00.

So you can come early if you want to.

Thank you so much, everyone.

Have a nice weekend, whatever is left of it.