Teaching Language Through Critical Thinking Strategies

Strategies are the means to achieve the learning goals. Training students in using critical thinking strategies certainly help them become critical thinkers as well as foster awareness to make thinking critically a habit of their thinking process. The first article summary is a study conducted in Bahrain on using strategies for effective teaching to promote critical thinking and deep learning. The study proposes the use of effective strategies and online tools by teachers with greater involvement in teaching at the K-12 level to promote critical thinking, deep learning besides making sense of the content in the curricula. The second article proposes the use of meta-cognitive strategies to develop critical thinking precisely because of the fact that critical thinking involves cognitive and metacognitive components. Training students in meta-cognitive strategies helps them to take charge of and gain control over thinking. The think-aloud protocol is the best tool to verbalize one’s thought process. The third article presents an interesting revelation regarding the role of language of instruction in secondary schools in Tanzania. The other two major factors that promote or bar the promotion of critical thinking are teachers’ knowledge and beliefs of critical thinking and the classroom environment. The results showed that using the native language motivated students to freely ask probing and open-ended questions as they did not have enough proficiency in English. The fourth article is based on Decision-Based Learning (DBL) as an innovative method to teach critical thinking skills. The results of the study show that training in DBL could develop four of the six critical thinking components thus confirming that DBL can be used as an instructional approach to partially foster critical thinking among other higher-order thinking skills that include problem solving and mathematical course performance.