Capturing Students' Critical Thinking Skills in English for Academic Writing Course

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marisca Revani Putri ◽  
Shiyrah Theosebes Sela
Keyword(s):  
Critical Thinking ◽  
Academic Writing ◽  
Thinking Skills ◽  
Critical Thinking Skills ◽  
Writing Course

scholarly journals Importance and development of Critical Thinking in BA Academic Writing Course

enadakultura ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ketevan Gochitashvili ◽  
Giuli Sha bashvili
Keyword(s):  
Critical Thinking ◽  
Academic Writing ◽  
Relevant Information ◽  
Thinking Skills ◽  
Critical Thinking Skills ◽  
Main Research ◽  
Professional Career ◽  
Writing Course ◽  
Specific Activities ◽  
Secondary Information

Critical thinking is a complex phenomenon, that helps the learner to separate relevant information from irrelevant and unnecessary information, to evaluate and explain events and facts, to formulate a clear argument objectively, to deliver the right message to the target audience, and to find ways to solve the problem. Critical thinking is directly related to the teaching of academic writing and is a transferable skill that helps students both to complete other university courses successfully and to build a further professional career. The aim of the paper is to identify the challenges and problems faced by both instructors and students at the university level in Georgia in terms of developing critical thinking skills while teaching/learning an academic writing course. Moreover, the paper presents specific activities to solve the given problems. The paper offers teachers the basic strategies and techniques that can be used to achieve the goals set out in the curriculum. The following research methods are applied: questionnaires and classroom observation.The following factors can be named as limitations of the research: relatively small number of students; The study was conducted for only one semester.The analysis of the questionnaires revealed the following issues related to critical thinking and writing for the students: lack of ability to formulate an objective critical opinion, reliability of sources, formulation of main research questions and hypotheses, generalization, separation of main and secondary information, focus on key issues and formulation of logical coherent conclusions.The paper suggests specific activities and questions for the development of critical thinking that are needed to process a text or information.The use of these approaches and methods should be implemented at different levels of the course. The teacher in advance should design and plan activities that will be used during the class. Critical thinking development activities should be combined with all the assignments and activities covering all the topics of the course. In the process of searching the proper materials, the student should master the techniques of working on sources, the criteria for determining the reliability and relevance of sources. In addition, the student should be able to process a significant amount of materials, merge main and secondary information, paraphrase the information, and integrate it into their own text in accordance with academic standards. As a result, the student should be able to evaluate the material retrieved and present and argue their own position.

scholarly journals Teaching Teachers To Think: Reflective Journaling As A Strategy To Enhance Students Understanding And Practice Of Academic Writing

2010 ◽  
Vol 7 (12) ◽  
Author(s):  
Danielle Watson
Keyword(s):  
Critical Thinking ◽  
Academic Writing ◽  
Learning Process ◽  
Writing Process ◽  
Thinking Skills ◽  
Critical Thinking Skills ◽  
Effective Strategy ◽  
Reflective Journaling ◽  
Reflective Journal ◽  
Factors Influencing

The value of reflective journaling as an effective strategy to enhance learning has been explored by several writers. Many see it as a way of approaching learning to enhance the understanding of factors influencing or hindering the learning process and the development of meaning through critical thinking skills. The underlying purpose of the study is to explore the possibility of introducing the reflective journal into the teaching of academic writing as a strategy to improve students’ understanding of the different expository methods employed as part of the writing process.

scholarly journals Developing College EFL Writers’ Critical Thinking Skills Through Online Resources: A Case Study

SAGE Open ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 8 (4) ◽  
pp. 215824401882038 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xiaodong Zhang
Keyword(s):  
Critical Thinking ◽  
Foreign Language ◽  
Academic Writing ◽  
Thinking Skills ◽  
Critical Thinking Skills ◽  
Online Resources ◽  
Writing Classroom ◽  
Efl Writing ◽  
Student Writers

This study reports on how the supplementation of online resources, informed by systemic functional linguistics (SFL), impacted English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) student writers’ development of critical thinking skills. Through qualitative analyses of student-teacher interactions, interviews with students, and students’ written documents, the case study shows that through 1 semester of intensive exposure to SFL-based online resources in a college Chinese EFL writing classroom, EFL writers were able to develop critical thinking skills in regard to the construction of effective academic writing, although it was a process of encountering and overcoming challenges. Through teacher mediation and their own efforts, they could adjust to the online resources-based classroom, exemplified by their utilization of SFL-related categories offered through online resources to analyze and evaluate the interrelationship between language features and the content manifested in valued texts, and regulate the content of their own academic writing.

scholarly journals Critical Thinking in University through a Curriculum-wide Reading and Writing Project

2021 ◽  
pp. 195-236
Author(s):  
James Dunn ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Critical Thinking ◽  
Thinking Skills ◽  
Critical Thinking Skills ◽  
Logical Thinking ◽  
Academic English ◽  
Ministry Of Education ◽  
Reading And Writing ◽  
Writing Project ◽  
Writing Course ◽  
Logical Fallacies

Critical thinking has gained popularity in the English as a foreign language (EFL) educational arena of late in Japan due to the Ministry of Education (MEXT) updating its requirements of English education to include logical thinking. This has caused the need for educators in Japan to quickly adapt to the inclusion of logical thinking, and by extension, critical thinking in their curriculum (MEXT, 2011) from 2013. Even though MEXT has required critical thinking to be included in the classroom, it seems very little has been done to include true critical thinking into textbooks and institutions’ curriculum designs. One crucial component of the language teaching curriculum is the ability to think rationally, objectively, and deeply about a topic, or in other words, to think critically. Critical thinking has been shown to foster students’ abilities to analyze, evaluate, and judge the value of the information presented to them both inside, and outside, the classroom (Lund, 2016). Critical thinking also helps students to make their own decisions related to their academic, and future employment, success (Nold, 2017). In a university-level reading and writing course in Japan, for example, students must create manuscripts at beginner to advanced levels that somewhat adhere to the expectations of academic English communities (Fang & Schleppegrell, 2010) when it comes to topic development and utilizing source information. In order to reflect on, and thereby judge the veracity of, the information presented to them either by their textbook in the classroom or by external sources, critical thinking skills allow students to deconstruct, reflect upon, and assign value to information sources. This also allows them to construct their own content on two levels, one, projecting their creativity as independent thinkers, and two, linguistically as writers who can think about a topic more deeply. The purpose of this paper is to share the planning, design, and implementation of a critical thinking reading and writing project which was introduced into the second-year EFL reading and writing focused courses at Tokai University from the spring and fall semesters of 2019. The reading and writing course, named Academic English (AE), was split into three levels depending upon the students’ performance in their first-year English courses. Each level of the AE course had a project book that was individualized for their corresponding textbook and level. The project’s focus, for all levels, was to develop critical thinking skills through the introduction of reflective thinking, logical fallacies, and research skills. At the end of the project, students were asked to apply their critical thinking skills to their textbook and research the veracity of the information presented to them in one of their required readings during the course. The overall reception of the project by the students was positive and results of a post-project questionnaire showed that students felt they had gained some mastery over critical thinking on subjects both in the classroom and in their lives. The project has seen success in allowing students to become learners who are more independent in their thinking, more critical in their reception to information provided to them, and better writers who are able to think on a topic more deeply and logically.

scholarly journals Process genre approach to L2 academic writing: An intervention study

XLinguae ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 30-51
Author(s):  
Svetlana Hanusova ◽  
Olga Dontcheva-Navratilova ◽  
Marie Lahodova Valisova ◽  
Marketa Matulova
Keyword(s):  
Graduate Students ◽  
Academic Writing ◽  
English Language ◽  
Interdisciplinary Approach ◽  
Thinking Skills ◽  
Critical Thinking Skills ◽  
Study Program ◽  
Writing Courses ◽  
Academic Texts ◽  
Writing Course

The paper presents the research study of academic writing of Czech university students in an English Language Teacher Education study program. The authors apply an interdisciplinary approach integrating the perspectives of linguistics and language pedagogy in the evaluation of the design of the Academic Writing course and its impact on the development of students’ academic writing skills. Adopting a process genre approach (Badger, White, 2000) to writing instruction as a key design principle, our study combines the genre analysis framework (Swales, 1990) and the intercultural rhetoric perspective (Connor, 2004) to design an innovated academic writing course for graduate students focusing on developing critical thinking skills and context-aware writing. The course, informed by an analysis of the academic writing needs of the students, aimed at familiarizing them with the rhetorical structure of academic texts with a focus on the genre of the Master’s thesis and at introducing them to the academic writing conventions in the area of soft sciences. Piloted in 2019, the course was implemented as a blended course, where the contact sessions were complemented by online support in VLE Moodle. Apart from analyses of written texts, classroom writing, and homework tasks, it also included discourse editing tasks and peerreviewing with peer-reviewer feedback and teacher feedback. We believe that our research findings will shed light on the potential of academic writing courses based on the process-genre approach to contribute to the enhancement of the quality of English academic texts by non-native academic writers, and specifically Czech graduate students.

scholarly journals Exploring the Connection between Critical Thinking Skills and Academic Writing

2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 118-128
Author(s):  
Noor Hanim Rahmat ◽  
Norhartini Aripin ◽  
Nur Maizura Lin ◽  
Wararat Whanchit ◽  
Zulaikha Khairuddin
Keyword(s):  
Critical Thinking ◽  
Academic Writing ◽  
Thinking Skills ◽  
Critical Thinking Skills

scholarly journals FOSTERING CRITICAL THINKING SKILLS THROUGH ARGUMENTATIVE WRITING

2018 ◽  
Vol 37 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Susana Widyastuti
Keyword(s):  
Critical Thinking ◽  
Foreign Language ◽  
Thinking Skills ◽  
Critical Thinking Skills ◽  
Argumentative Writing ◽  
Writing Classes ◽  
Essay Writing ◽  
English As Foreign Language ◽  
Writing Course

Abstract: The urgency for developing students’ critical thinking (CT) abilities has left English as a Foreign Language (EFL) teachers trying hard to integrate CT into their teaching practices. This study highlights the role of language as a way of thinking, judging and assessing. It seeks to investigate how the elements of CT are displayed in students’ essay so as to reveal the development of their CT skills. The data are in the form of essay written by the fourth semester Indonesian students taking essay writing course. The analysis is based on Stapleton’s   criteria of CT (2001), i.e. claims, kinds  of  reasoning,  the  extent  of   evidence,  recognition  of  opposing  arguments  and  refutation,  and  fallacies. The results show that there are many weak arguments in the essays due to the insufficiency of reasons and evidence. It is highly possible for an essay to have multiple arguments. However, the logical correlations between them are not clearly articulated in the essays and many students fail to show them. Students also lack of refutation skills as they tend to accept a claim from other sources without trying to judge and evaluate it. While most conclusions are in the form of suggestion, they can be made better by clearly showing the position of the writer in relation the arguments posed in the essay. Fallacies are mostly found in the form of generalization and over-simplification. The results are expected to give insights to teachers about how CT skills could be effectively taught and improved in writing classes. Key words: argumentative writing, critical thinking (CT), English as a Foreign Language (EFL)  MENGEMBANGKAN KEMAMPUAN BERPIKIR KRITIS MELALUI MENULIS ARGUMENTATIF Abstrak: Pentingnya mengembangkan kemampuan berpikir kritis (critical thinking atau CT) mahasiswa telah membuat para pengajar English as a Foreign Language (EFL) berusaha keras mengintegrasikan kemampuan berpikir kritis dalam pengajaran mereka. Penelitian ini menggarisbawahi peran bahasa sebagai sarana berpikir, menilai, dan mengevaluasi. Penelitian bertujuan untuk menggali bagaimana elemen-elemen berpikir kritis ditunjukkan dalam teks dan mengkaji perkembangan berpikir kritis dalam teks. Data berbentuk teks essay yang ditulis oleh mahasiswa semester 4 yang mengambil matakuliah Essay Writing. Data dianalisis berdasarkan kriteria Critical Thinking (CT) oleh Stapleton (2001), yaitu argument, reason, evidence, opposition and refutation, conclusion, dan fallacy. Hasil penelitian menunjukkan bahwa argumen sering lemah karena tidak didukung oleh  alasan dan bukti yang cukup. Suatu esai sangatlah mungkin mengandung banyak argumen. Namun demikian, hubungan logis antar argumen tersebut tidak jelas dalam esai dan bahkan banyak mahasiswa gagal menunjukkan hubungan tersebut. Mahasiswa juga lemah dalam hal refutation skill karena mereka cenderung menerima klaim dari sumber lain begitu saja tanpa mencoba mengevaluasi dan mempertanyakannya. Kebanyakan kesimpulan berbentuk saran dan bisa dibuat lebih baik dengan menyatakan dengan jelas posisi penulis dalam menanggapi argumen-argumen yang dikemukakan di awal. Fallacy kebanyakan dalam bentuk generalisasi dan penyederhanaan berlebihan. Hasil penelitian ini diharapkan dapat memberikan masukan tentang bagaimana kelas menulis dapat dirancang secara efektif supaya dapat menumbuhkan baik kemampuan berpikir kritis maupun kemampuan berbahasa. Kata kunci: tulisan argumentatif, berpikir kritis, English as Foreign Language (EFL)

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