Critical thinking, literature and teachers’ instructional activities: An Indonesian case of community service program for English teachers

Abstract

Critical thinking (CT) has generally been known as one of the core competencies of the 21st-century skills that students need to acquire to succeed in today’s world. To attain this goal, teachers undoubtedly have a critical role to play. Involving a group of Indonesian teachers of English, this study aims to explore the teachers’ initial conceptions of critical thinking as reflected in their planned classroom activities. Specifically, the data collected were in the form of written instructional activities that used literary works as learning materials. These data were obtained following the teachers’ participation in an online workshop on promoting critical thinking through literature held for English teachers from MGMP (i.e., English Teachers Working Group) in Bandung Regency. The workshop introduced a model of teaching critical thinking skills using literary works and required the teachers to design their own instructional activities based on the proposed CT model. Adopting content analysis as the methodological tool to scrutinize the teachers’ prepared materials, our initial findings indicate that, in general, the teachers had inadequate knowledge of how to incorporate critical thinking skills into their teaching. Literature was seen merely as a tool to develop students’ linguistic abilities rather than as a way to explore humans’ experiences and to connect ‘the word and the world’. This study recommends that the teachers be given more time to better explore the concepts surrounding critical literacy pedagogy as well as be given more opportunities for practical application of the promoted instructional model.

Translanguaging Pedagogies in EFL Writing Education

“…For tertiary level courses critical thinking plays a key role in success (Floyd, 2011), and the importance of this ability has captured much attention of Chinese educators (Bagheri, 2015). For writing relates to cognitive skills and dispositions, two key components of critical thinking (Gandana et al, 2021), it is of great significance to explore the influence of translanguaging pedagogies in EFL writing education on students' critical thinking.…”

“…This was why he designed and taught the LA writing course under the guidance of translanguaging pedagogies. When the teacher had the awareness of critical thinking, he could consciously improve students' critical thinking (Gandana et al, 2021).…”

“…In China's EFL writing classrooms, it is universally seen that the teachers tend to avoid using the students' mother tongue, which is a sign that language education has attempted to eradicate "interference" produced by the norms of different languages (García & Otheguy, 2020). This instruction fails to improve students' critical thinking that has been regarded as part of the 21st century skills (Gandana et al, 2021).…”

Teaching Narrative Texts in Young Learners’ Classroom During Pandemic Covid-19: An Analysis from A Multiliteracies Perspective

“…It involves a conscious, rational, and systematic understanding of texts. This allows for constructing meaning out of the text (Gandana, Nafisah, & Imperiani, 2021). This component develops an explicit meta-language to support active interventions that scaffold student learning (Benjamin, 2014, p. 116).…”

The Genre Approaches for Teachers’ Strategy to Deliver Productive Teaching-Learning in English Subject at Sman 1 Kota Langsa

“…The directive teaching, a conventional delivery, actively encouraged the teacher to be the center of information, should be narrowed to give students space for developing their pathways (D. Irmawati et al, 2017;Kadwa & Alshenqeeti, 2020). The reason for having communicative in delivery materials with constantly engaging the students leads to students' process in escalating their reasoning (Gandana et al, 2021;Irianto et al, 2019;Ulfa & Bania, 2019). Moreover, in learning a foreign language as a means of communication and knowledge, the teaching section should be advised for engaging discussion than a directive task, pitching dialogues one to another between teacher and students, and specifying words of selective diction (D. K. Irmawati et al, 2021;Sariakin, 2021).…”