Tasks for Critical Thinking and Language Learning

Any formal instruction in an academic institution calls for teacher intervention in the learning process. The traditional system of teacher being the knowledge giver is obsolete with the changing needs and demands of education and career in the twenty-first century along with going digital. Learners are to be prepared for autonomous and lifelong learning. For this task-based approach is accepted to be an appropriate one adopted by all educational institutions across the countries, levels and academic programmes. This chapter presents studies across different countries that promoted critical thinking through various tasks. The first article summary presents a study on health profession educators where problem-based tasks were executed to be solved collaboratively to enhance critical thinking and develop interpersonal competencies through learning issues. The conclusions of this study reveal that enhancing critical thinking increased the learners understanding of learning issues (a meta cognitive process) in problem-based learning. This also helped them overcome gender biases and engage themselves more productively in the learning process. The second article is also based on medical profession undergraduate dental students, where serious graphic games are used to educate, train, and elicit students’ perspectives. The games helped improve their critical thinking and decision-making skills. The third article is on developing 4Cs (Critical, creative, communication and collaboration) that are considered to be crucial in STEM (Science, technology, Engineering and Mathematics) education in an inline course. The implications of this study are for teachers on the kinds of problems and instructions to be given on problem-based digital-making tasks/activities in professional development programmes for teachers. The fourth article summary presents the results of a comparative study on the impact to teaching argument mapping, one of the higher order thinking skills, using a software and a paper and pencil to Iranian English as Foreign Language students. The results showed that the students who used software to learn critical thinking outperformed those using paper and pencil. A standard California Critical Thinking Skills Test is used to check the progress and compare the results. The fifth article summary is on Bloom’s higher order thinking strategies resulting in learner autonomy in the Iranian EFL learners. The three strategies used to enhance learner autonomy for this study are learning and thinking, questioning and cooperative learning. It concludes that implementing the HOT strategies affects EFL learners’ autonomy in addition to their inferential reading comprehension abilities.