The commentary of intertexts in SFL class: exposition and argumentation for the development of critical thinking

Abstract

The purpose of this exploratory work is to verify if the students who have carried out an intersemiotic and multimodal activity involving narrative, written and visual texts, have applied the critical thinking practices indicated by Paul and Elder. During the practice, it has been observed whether the students, without a specific training on critical thinking, have implicitly developed the bases of said ability. For this, a Corpus has been used that compiles the summaries and narrations of the windmills’ episode from Don Quixote de la Mancha, made with a textual input: chapter VIII of Cervantes' work and two filmic hypertexts. In the analysis, the elements of critical thinking and the universal intellectual standards have been related to the fundamental textual qualities, in an attempt to verify that these postulates can be applied to narrative and expository texts. The results have shown that the students have inferred the elements of critical thinking from the literary text and the filmic ones that they have received as input and have developed them linguistically in their productions, as well as the universal intellectual standards. Therefore, we believe that all textual typologies, and not only the argumentative one, are developed following these elements and that students internalize, collate and analyze in a natural way, multimodal inputs to create new texts that they produce with a critical sense.