An investigation of integrating critical thinking skills into ELT pre-service teacher education programs

The idea of teaching higher-order thinking skills in schools besides the subject matter has been around for the last decades in the field of education. However, the reciprocity between critical thinking and language learning and its paramount role in raising effective global citizens who can cope with the contemporary challenges of 21st century work arena is a recently acknowledged issue. The devastating spread of digital technologies in daily life makes the need to act selectively and wisely a must in gaining knowledge which is a vital component of higher-order thinking, accompanied by effective communication skills with people from other nations. Therefore, the development of a culture of higher-order thinking in language classrooms has become an important goal of language education. Nonetheless, the awareness of language teachers and pre-service language teachers regarding the prominence of critical thinking – a higher-order thinking skill - in language teaching, and the ways they could merge critical thinking with their teaching remain to be scarcely researched. Derived from this necessity, the aim of this study was two-fold: first, to explore pre-service English teachers' perceptions on i) critical thinking, ii) how to integrate critical thinking into language education, and iii) the challenges that could be faced during this process; secondly, to determine whether there was a development in their perceptions towards critical thinking, how to integrate it into language teaching and the real-context challenges after an action plan implementation on CT-based language instruction. Besides the perceptual dimension, to what extent the pre-service teachers could transfer the knowledge they gained from the training intervention into practice was also examined. This practical side of the study represented the unique dimension that could offer promising implications for the related literature. As such, the study comprising of a practical action research design investigated the impact of a 14 week action plan implementation on 8 pre-service English teachers' awareness and teaching skills regarding the integration of critical thinking into language teaching. Data collection involved the use of semi-structured interviews, CT-tasks, lesson plans, observation forms of the video-recorded macro teachings, and self-reflection journals of the participants. Both quantitative analysis in the form of descriptive statistics and qualitative analysis in the form of content analysis were performed to scrutinize the results. The study revealed outstanding findings in relation to the research questions. First of all, a perceptual improvement on the part of the participants in connection with the concept of critical thinking was obviously observed. Before the action plan implementation, the participants offered vague, superficial or limited definitions of critical thinking, which showed their hesitance about the meaning of critical thinking, whereas their explanations at the end of the study were much more comprehensive and self-confident indicating a cognitive shift about the term. Another important finding was about their awareness on how to integrate critical thinking into language teaching. The in-depth analysis of the data demonstrated that they had a more positive attitude with plenty of ideas on the techniques and the activities to be employed for fostering critical thinking in a language classroom at the end of the study. The challenges of teaching critical thinking in language classrooms mentioned by the participants both before and after the implementation period were in line with the related literature. The salient difference was that they had a tendency to blame the external factors, such as the education system or the students in the pre-stage, but they also articulated the teacher related internal constraints, such as lack of background information and experience on infusing critical thinking into language teaching in the post-stage. Finally, the participants were remarkably able to transfer the procedures and the techniques they were exposed to during the action plan implementation period into their macro teachings despite the external and internal obstacles. This indicated that pre-service English teachers could successfully integrate critical thinking into language teaching so long as they were given sufficient and appropriate guidance. Keywords: Critical thinking, pre-service teacher education, action research