Педагогические науки/2. Современные методы преподавания

Абилова А.Х., Бектурганова А.О.

Карагандинский Государственный университет им. академика Е.А.Букетова, Казахстан

The importance of learning critical thinking and

critical reading skills

The main issue of this thesis is the importance of critical thinking and critical reading in education. It represents some practical tips on critical reading in order to help learners to be more critical about the information taken from different resources.

Critical thinking is important, because it enables one to analyze, evaluate, explain, and restructure our thinking, decreasing thereby the risk of adopting, acting on, or thinking with, a false belief.

One of the most famous contributors to the development of the critical thinking tradition is Robert Ennis. His definition is as follows: “Critical thinking is reasonable, reflective thinking that is focused on deciding what to believe or do.” [1, 4]

People have been thinking about ‘critical thinking’ and have been researching how to teach it for about a hundred years. John Dewey, the American philosopher, psychologist and educator, is widely regarded as the ‘father’ of the modern critical thinking tradition. [1, 2] He called it ‘reflective thinking’ and defined as:

“Active, persistent, and careful consideration of a belief or supposed form of knowledge in the light of the grounds which support it and the further conclusions to which it tends”.

By defining critical thinking as an ‘active’ process, Dewey is contrasting it with the kind of thinking in which you just receive ideas and information from someone else – what you might reasonably call a ‘passive’ process. For Dewey, and for everyone who has worked in this tradition subsequently, critical thinking is essentially an ‘active’ process – one in which person think things through for himself, raise question himself, find relevant information himself, etc. rather than learning in a largely passive way from someone else.

In defining critical thinking as ‘persistent’ and ‘careful’ Dewey is contrasting it with the kind of unreflective thinking we all engage in sometimes, for example when we ‘jump’ to a conclusion or make a ‘snap’ decision without thinking about it. Sometimes, of course, we have to do this because we need to decide quickly or the issue is not important enough to warrant careful thought, but often we do it when we ought to stop and think – when we ought to ‘persist’ a bit.

In this research work we want to write about critical reading as an inseparable part of critical thinking in education.

Reading itself is a complex intellectual activity, governed by conventions but not reducible to foolproof rules. We read, in other words, as members of one or several communities with certain assumptions and expectations that inevitably influence our reading. [2, 3]

Reading is of great educational importance, as reading is a means of communication, people get information they need from books, journals, magazines, newspapers, etc. Through reading in a foreign language the pupil enriches his knowledge of the world around him. [3, 199]

Barnett writes that reading has always held an important place in foreign and second language programs. And she adds that reading is now seen in different light, namely “as communication, as a mental process, as the reader’s active participation in the creation of meaning, as a manipulation of strategies, as a receptive rather than as a passive skill”. [4, 163]

Reading a text critically means that learner do not accept what he is reading at face value. This does not necessarily mean that he should find fault with a text, but rather that he should question and judge the worth of the information it contains.

We can distinguish between critical reading and critical thinking in the following way:

Critical thinking is a technique for evaluating information and ideas, for deciding what to accept and believe. It involves reflecting on the validity of what student has read in light of his prior knowledge and understanding of the world.

When student reads, he has to seek information, and he is confronted with different views, which force him to consider his own position. In this process, the reader is converted to a "writer", whether or not he writes or publishes his own ideas.

Critical reading is a technique for discovering information and ideas within a text. Critical reading refers to a careful, active, reflective, analytic reading.

For example, consider the following (somewhat humorous) sentence from a student essay: Parents are buying expensive cars for their kids to destroy them.

As the terms are used here, critical reading is concerned with figuring out whether, within the context of the text as a whole; "them" refers to the parents, the kids, or the cars, and whether the text supports that practice. Critical thinking would come into play when deciding whether the chosen meaning was indeed true, and whether or not you, as the reader, should support that practice.

By these definitions, critical reading would appear to come before critical thinking: Only once we have fully understood a text (critical reading) can we truly evaluate its assertions (critical thinking). [5]

Conversely, critical thinking depends on critical reading. We can think critically about a text (critical thinking), after all, only if we have understood it (critical reading). We may choose to accept or reject a presentation, but we must know why. We have a responsibility to ourselves, as well as to others, to isolate the real issues of agreement or disagreement. Only then can we understand and respect other people’s views. To recognize and understand those views, we must read critically.

The usefulness of the distinction lies in its reminder that we must read each text on its own merits, not imposing our prior knowledge or views on it. While we must evaluate ideas as we read, we must not distort the meaning within a text. We must not allow ourselves to force a text to say what we would otherwise like it to say or we will never learn anything new.

We must evaluate what we have read and integrate that understanding with our prior understanding of the world. To evaluate a text is to ask the “so what” question about it: So what makes this text important and interesting? So what is worth? Reader’s answers to the “so what” question explains why a text is worth reading or why it isn’t. [6, 161]

Critical reading is a form of skepticism that does not take a text at face value, but involves an examination of claims put forward in the text as well as implicit bias in the texts framing and selection of the information presented. The ability to read critically is an ability assumed to be present in scholars and to be learned in academic institutions.

To read critically is to make judgements about how a text is argued. This is a highly reflective skill requiring learner to "stand back" and gain some distance from the text he is reading. The key moments here are as follows:

· he mustn’t read looking only or primarily for information;

· he must read looking for ways of thinking about the subject matter.

To the critical reader, any single text provides but one portrayal of the facts. Critical readers thus recognize not only what a text says, but also how that text portrays the subject matter. They recognize the various ways in which each and every text is the unique creation of a unique author.

A non-critical reader might read a history book to learn the facts of the situation or to discover an accepted interpretation of those events. A critical reader might read the same work to appreciate how a particular perspective on the events and a particular selection of facts can lead to particular understanding.

Here we want to mention some of the critical reading strategies:

1. Previewing: Learning about a text before really reading it.

Previewing enables readers to get a sense of what the text is about and how it is organized before reading it closely. This simple strategy includes seeing what learners can learn from the head notes or other introductory material, skimming to get an overview of the content and organization, and identifying the rhetorical situation.

2. Contextualizing: Placing a text in its historical, biographical, and cultural contexts.

When students read a text, they read it through the lens of their own experience. Their understanding of the words on the page and their significance is informed by what they have come to know and value from living in a particular time and place. But the texts students read were all written in the past, sometimes in a radically different time and place. To read critically, they need to contextualize, to recognize the differences between their contemporary values and attitudes and those represented in the text.

3. Questioning to understand and remember: Asking questions about the content.

The students are accustomed to teachers asking them questions about their reading. These questions are designed to help students understand a reading and respond to it more fully, and often this technique works. Each question should focus on a main idea, not on illustrations or details, and each should be expressed in your own words, not just copied from parts of the paragraph.

4. Reflecting on challenges to students’ beliefs and values: Examining their personal responses.

The reading that students do for this class might challenge their attitudes, their unconsciously held beliefs, or their positions on current issues. As they read a text for the first time, students should mark an X in the margin at each point where they feel a personal challenge to their attitudes, beliefs, or status. Also they should take a brief note in the margin about what they feel or about what in the text created the challenge.

5. Outlining and summarizing: Identifying the main ideas and restating them in the students’ own words.

Outlining and summarizing are especially helpful strategies for understanding the content and structure of a reading selection. Whereas outlining reveals the basic structure of the text, summarizing synopsizes a selection's main argument in brief. Outlining may be part of the annotating process, or it may be done separately (as it is in this class). The key to both outlining and summarizing is being able to distinguish between the main ideas and the supporting ideas and examples.

6. Evaluating an argument: Testing the logic of a text as well as its credibility and emotional impact.

All writers make assertions that they want readers to accept as true. As a critical reader, students should not accept anything on face value but to recognize every assertion as an argument that must be carefully evaluated. An argument has two essential parts: a claim and support. The claim asserts a conclusion -- an idea, an opinion, a judgment, or a point of view -- that the writer wants reader to accept. The support includes reasons (shared beliefs, assumptions, and values) and evidence (facts, examples, statistics, and authorities) that give readers the basis for accepting the conclusion.

7. Comparing and contrasting related readings: Exploring likenesses and differences between texts to understand them better.

Many of the authors we read are concerned with the same issues or questions, but approach how to discuss them in different ways. Fitting a text into an ongoing dialectic helps increase understanding of why an author approached a particular issue or question in the way he or she did. [7]

Critical reading is important because it allows us to take information and actually do something with it. For example, many standardized tests ask students to read an article and determine an author’s purpose. No where in the article is the author going to say, “the purpose of this article is to …” and so on. The critical reader will be able to read the article and determine what the author wants his readers to gain from reading by analyzing and making inferences.

If to conclude, we want to say that it is not enough to know how to read, a student must also be able to take what he reads and do something with it. It goes without saying that critical thinking and reading skills make students think – really think, instead of imitating or simply repeating information. It is the most important ability which learners should improve to be successful in study and in life.

Sources:

1. Fisher, A. (2001). Critical thinking: an introduction. Cambridge University Press.

2. Fulwiler, T., Stephany, W. (2001). English Studies: Reading, Writing, and Interpreting Texts (1^st ed). McGraw – Hill Higher Education

3. Рогова Г.В. Методика обучения английскому языку (на английском языке): Учеб. пособие для студентов пед. ин-тов по спец. № 2103 «Иностр. яз» - 2-ое изд., перераб. и доп. – М.: Просвещение, 1983.

4. Hadley, A.O. (2001). Teaching Language in Context (2^nd ed). Boston, Massachusetts.

5. Kurland, D. (2000) How the Language Really Works: The Fundamentals of Critical Reading and Effective Writing, from http://www.criticalreading.com/critical_reading_thinking.htm

6. Turner, S.E. (2002). Critical Essays: Engaging with the Text and the World Around You. English Studies book.

7. http://www.salisbury.edu/counseling/New/7_critical_reading_strategies.html