Houda BOUMEDIENE
Université de Sidi Bel Abbes
Abstract:
Critical thinking is a common goal of different disciplines and the objective that most language teachers seek; however, the challenge for them lies in successfully enhancing EFL students’ critical thinking strategies especially within the limitations of a conventional classroom experience. Also, with the confine of contact time with learners, teachers face difficulty in fulfilling the learning process; and hence, they are forced to make effective decision concerning input coverage, good understanding, and critical analysis of teaching materials. Thus, they should integrate instructional tools and techniques that can efficiently promote students’ learning and critical thinking. Modern development in educational technology has generated a wide range of online tools to assist teachers. This paper will examine the theoretical foundations of critical thinking in education, present scientifically-based methods for integrating web instructional tools to foster critical thinking, and will provide practical recommendations for promoting critical thinking skills via online communication materials.
Keywords: Critical thinking, EFL students, educational technology, online communication materials
INTRODUCTION
In the current information era, obtaining useful knowledge is a challenge. Yet, students are surrounded by information: Through online newspapers, e-books, data bases and more lately through websites and social networks, students have a free access to a great deal of information without any tiring effort. What remains a challenge, still, is the development of the strategies that are required to critique and use this easy-to-find data. As EFL teachers, we want our students to acquire lessons and practice logical judgment. They have to be able to understand reasoned relationships among series of information, construct opinions, respect different perspectives, consider problems from diverse points of view, and possess the flexibility to revise their thinking when necessary. These are critical thinking skills.
CRITICAL THINKING SKILLS
“Critical thinking,” as defined by Michael Scriven and Richard Paul (2003), “is the intellectually disciplined process of actively and skill- fully conceptualizing, applying, analyzing, synthesizing, and/or evaluating information gathered from, or generated by, observation, experience, reflection, reasoning, or communication, as a guide to belief and action.” It is a process of intellectual qualification needed for the identification of critical thinking from Nukui and Brooks (2007) view “it is a fundamental component of academic life, and it is an essential skill when writing essays or reports, taking part in seminars and debates”.
Critical thinking is the basis of all studies where the EFL students are left to guess what their teachers mean when they are told to be more critical. According to the agreement of Kohzadi et.al (2014) “critical thinking is the purposeful self – regulatory judgment which results in interpretation, analysis, evaluation and inference as well as explanation of the evidential conceptual, methodological, and contextual considerations upon which that judgment was based”. Furthermore, critical thinking is seen as a process of achieving the higher level of thinking and reasoning abilities of the EFL learners by using some strategies in order to get the needed results. From this perspective, critical theory seems to be an appropriate resource in order to guide, correct and improve the students’ intellectual growth. In wide brief, critical thinking is considered as an academic skill of being able to look at ideas and problems to assess them. It also involves the ability to see links between concepts and enhance one’s own thoughts or active participation in different disciplines.
Many scholars basically stress the need to make learners critical thinkers (Facione & Facione, 2007; Moore, 2004; Muilenburg & Berge, 2000; Paul & Elder, 2006). Paul and Elder (2006) state that developing critical thinkers is important and should be the central goal of all academic institutions as well, through the use of effective steps. Moore (2004) considers that developing critical thinkers is necessary to have good learning, and further in order to act as dynamic and active citizens in our society. Olson (1984, p. 31) suggests that „By helping students become better thinkers, we would enable them to become better writers and vice-versa.“ Gelder (2005) explains that improving students’ critical thinking skills can be a universal aim of all academic endeavors.
More prominently, Chiu (2009, p. 43) defines critical thinking as „A skill of potential value for those who should objectively evaluate what they can and do dredge up from the ocean of online information currently available on the Internet“. Thus, Critical thinking is a highly desirable objective of online education courses. In every discipline there is an agreement that students need to improve their critical thinking skills (McLean, 2005). Critical thinking is more than just knowledge acquisition or a collection of processing skills; rather it is the development and continual use of analytical skills (Scriven & Paul, 2004). In general, Teachers are very concerned about improving critical thinking skills among students and find it a desirable outcome of nowadays education ( McLean, 2005).
TEACHING CRITICAL THINKING: PROCESS AND DIFFICULTIES
Critical thinking is an important skill for any learner. During studies, learners will need to draw on critical thinking making decisions, through which they will able to assess knowledge, developing skills and decreasing their reliance on others’ resources. Critical thinking is vital as it plays a good role in learning problem solving situations and interaction skills. Critical thinking can be easily taught. Teaching/learning it includes a series of steps. Each step needs to be illustrated and practiced and students given opportunity for undertaking this practice as part of assessment (Tittle, 2011).
Teachers need to provide students with time to practice and to receive feedback (Black, 2009). Thus, teaching critical thinking should be divided into two main steps: provide learners with a critical thinking protocol or process and then give them opportunities for students to apply this process. According to Thayer (2013) critical thinking process includes observe the primary data, analyse the main themes or arguments, evaluate and give value to facts, contextualise data according to historical, political cultural considerations (Liu,2014), question and test conclusions. Further, practicing the critical thinking process through tasks that provide students with a real context (for instance, future work field) will help their analysis. This would include: problem based tasks, case studies and simulations.
However, instructors face many obstacles in teaching the critical thinking process due to the practical constraints of conventional classes. Prominently, teachers have only a limited contact time with learners. This short time ensures them with minimal communication and critical analysis of the data provided. Further, most teachers used to teach with an emphasis on teacher-based methods that value content learning more than the process; they emphasize knowledge over the thought process even within evaluation; hence the learners’ main concern used to be on the overall course grade .More specifically, within the conventional instruction assessment may not be in place to measure students’ mastery of critical thinking skills, and students may be resistant to altering their focus toward nonfactual learning (Paul & Elder, 2004) .
INTEGRATING WEB COMMUNICATION TOOLS as a SOLUTION
Web communication materials and Technology provide two main benefits for teachers in order to enhance students’ critical thinking: it provides a means of moving learning tasks outside of class and henceforth time will be enough to have more critical thinking activities; and secondly it fosters the use of constructivist teaching theory by supplementing conventional face-to-face learning with more opportunities for individualized, in-depth interactions with course material (Shahrebabaki, 2015)
Today, web communication tools are available to students at home through a number of different online tools. Critical thinking skills had better be taught through reflection activities which are made available to learners at home through a number of different online platforms. For instance, Edmodo. It is a social website designed for students and teachers. The Edmodo network enables teachers to ask questions, distribute assignments, and manage interaction with students, other teachers, and parents. Thanks to Edmodo instructors can easily post information, ask questions to everyone in the class, share and correct students’ comments and problems then give grades.
Since “Learning is the desired outcome and technology is the enabler or enhancer” (Kinash, Knight, McClean, 2015), among the top ten key trends of technology integration identified by the “New york Times” is the increase in e-portfolios used by learners and good examples of e-portfolio platforms are Mahara ,Moodle ,and more recently Google Class which are considered as open sources of data, and in which learners can upload movies, files, photos…and can provide active discussion forums, for example, the teacher can tell his learners to have a debate about a video they watched in the platform. Pose the debate questions in the discussion forum, and give students instructions to follow a side of the debate and support their arguments. Such e-portfolios permit students to communicate with their peers, ask and answer questions that urge them to illustrate critical thinking skills and also show how they are involving in the critical thinking levels.
Moreover, in order to promote critical thinking skills of their learners , instructors have to think about using reflection activities that offer to students more opportunities to track their learning and show their improvement throughout the semester. Using Google Doc will facilitate the integration of reflection tasks into classrooms; for instance the teacher may ask students to keep a journal in which they reflect on what they are learning, describe the development they are making in the class, and cite course tools that have been most useful to them. Thus, students will share the Google Doc with him, and the instructor will comment on their work and create a dynamic critical online communication. All of these technologies become necessary in teachers’ efforts to make critical thinking skills more accessible to students.
CONCLUSION
Critical thinking skills are integral to educational operation. Critical thinking is an intellectual process which is, like many contents, progressive through time and experiences. Students nowadays need to be challenged in different strategies in order to make easier the development of their learning. Online communication materials provide students with the opportunity to review and re-review different courses and discussions and henceforth, enabling good thinking time. This enhances the ability to know, reflect, and problem solve through the use of careful and good planning of activities. This paper has brought some insights into the integration of online tools in teaching critical thinking skills and has clarified that web communication materials have developed so that students should be able to develop their learning through using them in their educational activity. More specifically, the emphasis should not be on the technology itself; rather the focus has to be on the authentic selection of appropriate web instructional activities to meet an effective critical thinking instruction as a goal.
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