Page 20 - Foundation Programs in Higher Education: Gateway to Success

Abstracts

Sevgi CAN
‘The stairway from knowledge to evaluation: Integrating critical
thinking skills to language instruction’

The question of how educators can help adult learners develop critical
thinking skills in foreign language classes has been deemed as an integral
element of language instruction. Critical thinking involves logical thinking
and reasoning including skills such as comparison, classification, sequencing,
cause/effect, patterning, webbing, analogies, deductive and inductive
reasoning, forecasting, planning, hypothesizing, and critiquing. Many
English Language Teaching (ELT) experts believe that the inclusion of critical
thinking skills in English classes is necessary to improve students’ English
competence and students’ critical thinking skills will be optimally increased
if meaning is prioritized in English lessons. This paper is written to address
the need for ways to integrate critical thinking strategies and meaning to
language classroom which is usually overlooked for the sake of covering set
curriculum goals. To do that, first Benjamin Bloom’s (1956) classification of
levels of intellectual behavior will be examined and looked at. His taxonomy
contained, basically, three overlapping domains: the cognitive, psychomo-
tor, and affective. Within the cognitive domain, he identified six levels:
knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation.
These domains and levels are still useful and valid today in helping students
develop their critical thinking skills and these inter-related domains can be
implemented into the classroom setting when teachers do collaborative
activities while stimulating students’ thinking process and encouraging them
negotiate meaning, simultaneously. In conclusion, this paper aims to shed
light on the issue of using language to negotiate meaning in the EFL (English
as Foreign Language) by examining how Bloom’s taxonomy can be integrated
with current teaching practices.

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