A Critical Approach to Critical Thinking in TESOL
- ISSN: 00398322
- DOI: 10.2307/3587975
Abstract
This article presents four more-or-less independent reasons why TESOL educators should be cautious about adopting critical thinking pedagogies in their classrooms: (a) Critical thinking may be more on the order of a non-overt social practice than a well-defined and teachable pedagogical set of behaviors; (b) critical thinking can be and has been criticized for its exclusive and reductive character; (c) teaching thinking to nonnative speakers may be fraught with cultural problems; and, (d) once having been taught, thinking skills do not appear to transfer effectively beyond their narrow contexts of instruction. A more recently developed model of cognitive instruction, cognitive apprenticeship, is then briefly discussed as a possible alternative to more traditional thinking skills pedagogies.
A Critical Approach to Critical Thinking in TESOL
Dwight Atkinson
TESOL Quarterly, Vol. 31, No. 1. (Spring, 1997), pp. 71-94.
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