Revista simpozionului Eficienta si calitate in educatie 2018 Revista simpozionului | Page 7

most of all, how we can process the information so it can be used in creative ways
to solve problems. Analytical thinking is what we should equip our students with if
they are to stand a chance in the after-school life.
Bloom’s taxonomy clearly outlines the skills that teachers should develop in their
learners in order to make their students learn more effectively, to take the learner
from lower level thinking to higher level thinking. While we all know that
understanding and applying are the lower level stages and that it is not what we
should aim at, all too often these are the aspects of learning we focus on in class.
It is only in the analyzing stage that we question how the information is presented
and take a good look at how that information is structured and argumented. The
stages of ‘evaluating’ and ‘creating’ should be the ones to dwell on, for it is only by
exercising these higher order thinking skills that students will be able to check the
validity of information and to come up with original solutions. And it is these
intellectual tasks that 21 st century young people will have to complete in the ever
more demanding world of work. Critical literacy, therefore, takes learners beyond
the development of basic literacy skills such as decoding, predicting, and
summarizing and asks them to become critical consumers of the information they
receive.
While critical thinking skills are not solely related to teaching foreign languages,
there is no doubt that in the English language class activities can and indeed
should be organized in such a manner as to develop these skills, alongside the
more strictly linguistic ones. And that is because communicative language tasks
rely heavily on students exercising these higher-order thinking skills, and not on
rote-learning of grammatical and vocabulary patterns. Authentic communication
involves personalization, investigation and problem-solving, elements that pertain
to critical thinking. It also relies on or starts from the use of authentic texts, which
students are supposed to be able to understand and use properly, checking their
sources and extracting the useful bits which they can then integrate for their own
communication purposes.
When students are presented with a text (whether spoken or written), they need to
grasp the overall meaning, to find details, to distinguish fact from opinion and to
find arguments and supporting evidence and ultimately to express their own view
concerning the text topic. When the texts are not presented to them by teachers,
but found online, on one of the multitude of sites and blogs at their disposal,
students must be able to “evaluate documents by asking critical questions,
assessing credibility, comparing sources, and tracking the origins of information’,
according to Dudeney, Hockly and Pegrum cited by John Hughes.
While some believe that critical thinking is not a skill that can be taught per se, that
it might develop naturally in time, most theoreticians are of the opinion that is worth
trying to purposely steer the students in that direction. Van Gelder and Mulnix,
quoted by Anthony Schmidt, discuss the question of how to teach critical thinking
and they offer some practical advice, much of which is based in cognitive science.
They believe that “there needs to be deliberate practice to master the skill”,
guidance and feedback. Once the skill is acquired, it is imperative that it be
transferred to other contexts as well, for it cannot be limited to one school subject
only. In terms of operationalization, critical thinking is manifested in activities of
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