Critical Thinking ’ s Effect on Vietnamese Students ’ Writing Attitude and Performance : Action Research (original) (raw)
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The aim of this article is to share both theoretical and practical ideas about critical thinking development within English language teaching/learning contexts especially in teaching writing. This paper is triggered by a major problem that has been observed by teachers and academic researchers in Indonesia which is that many students coming from different majors in university have been either hesitant or disorganized in writing an English essay. It can be an issue that Raimes (1985) points out that writing in ESL/EFL context needs to be dealt with at the particular level of linguistic and discourse proficiency that the intended students have reached. Due to this fact, Teaching writing, moreover, to non-English Department students is often considered as more complicated than teaching other language skills by the teacher of English. Therefore, teaching writing requires the teacher to involve various activities. Then, a new way to teach English writing focusing on developing students' critical thinking should be proposed. Students should be trained to be critical readers first to create a good composition who can write a clear, relevant, truthful, informative, interesting, and memorable text.
International Journal of Evaluation and Research in Education (IJERE)
Critical thinking (CT) is important for English as a foreign language (EFL) writing. However, the EFL writings of Chinese students are usually negatively commented on in terms of CT in writing. The study reviewed relevant studies on how CT in writing was taught to Chinese EFL learners at the tertiary education level. It shows most EFL writing teachers adopted existing western CT definitions in a general knowledge background and mainly used teacher-centered assessment techniques to teach CT. Students’ CT development was mostly assessed by self-designed CT assessments. Facing the globalization of CT teaching, the study thus updates the assessment techniques to meet the increasing needs of CT teaching in EFL writing in China. Relevant suggestions are also given to education practitioners.
Critical thinking is fundamental to all language learning skills and to all disciplines and aspects of our lives as well. This study investigates the effects of critical thinking on writing skill of the learners of teaching language as a foreign language, TEFL, students in Tehran Payame Noor University, Iran. Participants of the study consisted of 26 female TEFL students between ages of 24 to 40, who were selected non-randomly. All the subjects, as one group, were pretested before treatment and received a posttest after that in the form of two writings. A 4-point Likert scale questionnaire was given to the subjects before and after the treatment. All the procedure of the study was done via the Internet. Applying t-test to the results of the research revealed that although enhancing critical thinking skills had a statistically significant impact on TEFL subjects' writings. The implication might be that critical thinking is a process that should be taught from the very beginning levels of education system and integrated with all aspects of instruction in language learning pedagogy.
Unravelling Vietnamese Students' Critical Thinking and Its Relationship with Argumentative Writing
Universal Journal of Educational Research, 2020
Critical thinking has been recognized as a key academic skill due to its role in the learning process, especially in higher education, and particularly in second and foreign language teaching and learning of writing. This thinking pattern is crucial in Vietnamese tertiary education since in the globalized world of information. There has been increased demand for students to gain greater depth of subject-specific knowledge and develop their ability to synthesize, process, and evaluate different sources of texts for the sake of meeting the needs of their own academia and future studies. However, it is quite a new concept in Vietnamese educational system and few studies have been conducted to examine critical thinking in relation to argumentative writing. This paper, henceforth, reports a descriptive study that investigates the critical thinking ability of Vietnamese EFL (English as a foreign language) university students and its relationship with their writing argumentative essays. Data collected in this study include a questionnaire and an essay writing test. Participants were 126 EFL students at three universities in the Mekong delta, Vietnam. The findings reveal that Vietnamese EFL university students' critical thinking is at high level while it was statistically insignificant that a relationship between their critical thinking and their argumentative writing existed. The obtained results indicate that instructional methods and activities employed by Vietnamese EFL teachers in universities of the Mekong region may well promote cognitive development of their students. It also suggests urgent actions from EFL teachers and stake-holders to seek for feasible solutions to foster students' implementation of their cognitive skills into their writing and other language skills.
2020
The case study aims at students in the correlation between critical thinking and writing ability to analyze the students how the writing can improve the level of thinking. The main source of the data is observation in students in the third semester at English Teaching Education Department (ETED) of UINSA. This case is gotten in qualitative data by observing the class and interview with some students in the third semester in Written English (WE) class at English Teaching Education Department (ETED) of UINSA. This case study makes conclude that the results of this case are most of the students can't write with the correct grammar, not only that, but also the teachers don't understand what strategies for students.
The Influence of Critical Thinking on Developing Writing Skills
Foreign Languages in Uzbekistan
EFL students face several challenges when they are asked to compose essays. As a result, EFL students are often reluctant to participate in written assignments. Language learners try to apply grammatical rules accurately and use as many academic words as possible. However, the concepts offered are highly general, without any specific proof. The sequence of statements also does not complement each other logically but repeats itself. When analyzing existing school textbooks and curricula, little attention was paid to exercises designed to broaden students ’horizons. To enrich the content of the essay, it is advisable to expand the existing ideas on the topic and organize classes to form new ideas. To this end, the Socrates Seminar – Discussion – Project Work. Presentation was organized using a sequence of exercises. As a result of this 4-week research process, it was observed that the essays written by the students were different from the previous essays in terms of content and essenc...
Modern Journal of Language Teaching Methods, 2015
The present investigation was an attempt to study the Effectiveness of Teaching Critical Thinking on Iranian Upper-Intermediate EFL Learners' Essay Writing Ability. To that end, an OPT test was administered to 110 university students learning English language in institutes. Learners who scored between one above and below the standard deviation were selected. 40 learners were selected and they were divided into experimental and control group, each group contained 20 learners. A writing test was administered to both groups as a pre-test to take their initial knowledge of writing ability. The writing section of the TOEFL test was selected to test the writing ability of the participants. The experimental group received treatment in order to help them improve their writing ability by teaching critical thinking in fifteen sessions .The control group received no treatment. Finally both groups sat for the post-test of the same writing test. The results were analyzed through ANCOVA and it was explored that teaching critical thinking had a positive effect on Iranian EFL learners' essay writing ability.
Advances in Language and Literary Studies, 2015
The current study intended to find out the relationship between critical thinking skills and the quality of Iranian TEFL (Teaching English as a Foreign Language) students' writing. One-hundred forty students who were homogeneous in their language proficiency were selected non-randomly. The researcher asked students to take part in a proficiency test named Nelson test (intermediate 200B) and she chose students whose level was intermediate as participants of the study. This study was an associational (correlational) study. To achieve the goal of the study California Critical Thinking Test (form B) was administered among intermediate students to measure students' critical thinking skills (analysis, evaluation, inference). Then the researcher asked the participants to write on a given topic and their writings were rated by two language teachers by following the rules of scoring in Quellmaz's scale. The inter-rater correlation across all papers calculated in order to be sure about the objectivity and reliability of scores. The Pearson-Product Moment was used to examine the relationship between variables, furthermore multiple regressions was applied to predict the degree of their relationship. The results of the study revealed that there is a positive relationship between critical thing skills and writing quality. Furthermore, it was proved that evaluation has the strongest degree of relationship with the quality of writing.
LEARNING THROUGH WRITING: INFUSING CRITICAL THINKING INTO STUDENTS' WRITING
This action research sought to investigate the critical thinking (CT) skills of thirty (30) Grade 11 Humanities and Social Sciences (HUMSS) students in Old Poblacion National High School through their performance in writing academic papers. An “infusion approach” was employed to facilitate students’ critical thinking anchored on Paul and Elder’s (2001) CT model in an L2 writing context. In this study, students were asked to write a position paper (Essay 1) before the treatment was introduced. Another essay (Essay 2) was written during the study and another one (Essay 3) was taken as the post-test essay. For essays 2 and 3, infusion approach was applied. Students followed the four-step process in writing: brainstorming, drafting, peer review, and revision. The explicit inclusion of critical thinking in the teaching instruction occurred only in brainstorming and peer review using a CT-oriented brainstorming worksheet and CT-oriented peer review checklist respectively. After a four-week study, students’ pretest and post-test CT writing scores were assessed by three inter-raters using the “criteria for assessing critical thinking in L2 writing.” Hence, one-group pretest-posttest only design was utilized in the study. Findings revealed that students’ critical thinking before the employment of infusion approach was “very poor” and it had progressed to “poor” after following the infusion approach. In addition, the result in paired samples t-test showed a significant difference between the pretest and post-test CT means scores, suggesting an improvement in the CT and L2 writing scores. Despite the improvement, students’ critical thinking emerging from L2 writing remained at poor level. This suggests that students’ facility of the English language and the application of critical thinking need further strengthening to, at least, attain the average level.
A Study of Critical Thinking Skills Practice in Collaborative Writing in EFL Context
Asian Journal of Education and Training, 2022
The present study aims to explore critical thinking from EFL Thai students’ perspectives in collaborative writing activity. The subjects were 32 second-year English major students composing paragraph writing in the Writing II course. They were divided into three groups based on their English proficiency: advanced, intermediate, and novice, and data was collected using quantitative and qualitative approaches. The critical thinking skills questionnaire was utilized to collect quantitative data, and the results were analyzed using Mean and Standard deviation. For qualitative data, an interview was used to collect critical thinking skills practice of six students randomly selected. The quantitative results revealed that the highest critical thinking skills practice was found in analyzing (Mean=3.47, SD=1.15), followed by evaluating (Mean=3.44, SD=1.27), and creating (Mean=3.34, SD=.03), respectively. For qualitative results, it was found that the students in the high level of English pr...