ELT News Think Tank

This Month's Think Tank Panel

Marc Helgesen

Chuck Sandy

Panelists: Marc | Chuck
Date: March 2003

Topic: "How can I encourage my students to use higher level thinking skills?"

Chuck Sandy

Anyone who's spent much time with other people, in or out of classrooms, lives daily -- on personal, community, and global levels -- with the consequences of the lack of deep, thorough, critical thought. We witness it in the student who decides not to turn in that final paper, in the colleague who responds to criticism with an angry emotional outburst, in the partner who thinks no one will ever find out or be hurt by his moral lapse, in the world-leader who resorts to name-calling and schoolyard behavior and calls this debate.

“Although much human misery is a direct result of our inability to think things through, little has ever been done to teach anyone how to think.”

We confuse hormonal urges and emotions for thought, fail to see the huge leaps in logic in public debates, believe that moral clarity and community values are universally shared -- when they are clearly not -- and often fail to sort through available information to separate the true from the false, and almost more importantly, what we, as individuals, truly think about an issue. What this has to do with education is -- everything.

A recent article in the International Herald Tribune argued that although much human misery is a direct result of our inability to think things through, little has ever been done to teach anyone how to think, and that when we do begin to promote thinking in the classroom we call it critical thinking and load that term full of culture, class, and gender values so that the ensuing debate overshadows the thinking. When we do get beyond the debate, we often and falsely believe that everyone does and should think like us. Nothing could be more untrue or a better example of the lack of critical thought.

However, this use of the term critical thinking is not what I mean when I talk about deep, thorough, critical thought. I mean, more, what my father meant when he would tell me to think things through, or more, that kind of thought that takes place when a friend says, "Why do you think that?" and then one needs to state and defend one's reasoning, and perhaps sources of information. I mean even more the kind of thought that takes place in a classroom when someone says "these two articles are about the same thing but the writers have different opinions" or "I agree with this article more" or "I don't think that's true" or "I think we need more information."

Are English language students, even low-level students capable of this? Of course they are -- if you trust them and teach them how to think, how to express their opinions, and that their thoughts are valuable.

While many have argued that critical thinking, with its Western rhetoric and implied value-system, has no place in an EFL classroom -- one in which students are not preparing for education at a Western university -- no one could argue against encouraging and promoting thought in these classrooms: yet some do. The arguments, of course, involve lack of vocabulary and structure, misguided ideas that students do not wish to form opinions -- or even that they are incapable of forming opinions -- or that doing so is somehow culturally inappropriate.

While holding such opinions is becoming less common, this has more to do with the trend to follow content-based or thematic teaching models than it does any increase in critical thought. Sadly, many classes are still built around the dialogue, the use-your-own-information-substitution-drill, the little role-play, and the fun game. Yet, one can hardly blame English language teachers for this. We've been trained to discourage thought and to reward spontaneity. Many of us are even guilty of writing textbooks that do this and of going around the world promoting the idea that it's all about communication. It's not.

Though I certainly do not mean to blame the Communicative Approach for the lack of thought in many language classrooms, it is ironic that this movement -- which has done so much to improve language teaching -- has also had the side-effect of devaluing thought. It's partially due to the wide-spread misunderstanding of what the Communicative Approach is and how it works, but in practice, many of us have come to reward those who are most vocal -- the ones who are uninhibited about making language mistakes -- while penalizing, in one way or another, the quieter students, the ones who attempt to take the time to think things through, and while doing so, slow things down.

With this emphasis on pace and the spontaneous answer, it's hard for many teachers not to jump in and finish a slow student's response, or to pass quiet students by in favor of those always ready with some answer. The truth is, those quiet students are often the ones with the most thoughtful responses, simply because they are taking the time to think things through, working out not only the language of what they want to say, but what they really want to say. It took me a long time to figure this out.

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Panelists: Marc | Chuck

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