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Developing critical reading skills for first year students in English department, college of foreign languages, Vietnam national university, Hanoi
1 Part 1 introduction 1 Background to the study and statement of the problem 1.1 Critical thinking and critical reading skills in the Age of Information In the Age of Information, people are facing up with the information overload which can be both an advantage and a big threat It is, therefore, necessary for people especially youngsters to have good ability of not being drowned in the ocean of information Accordingly, reading, which is the most popular means of processing information, should be taken into account Among the amount of information needed, the questions of what to read, how to read effectively and what to believe are worthy of readers’ consideration In such a situation, critical reading is an essential skill which is described by Harris and Hodges (1981) as a process of making judgments in reading, evaluating relevance and adequacy of what is read, an act of reading in which a questioning attitude, logical analysis and inference are used to judge the worth of what is reading according to an establish standard Critical reading which is significant to EFL students for mastering critical reading skills will provide students with the ‘right tool’ (Milan, 1995), in short term, to enhance their process of studying at university and, in long term, to serve them well for the rest of their life A remarkable number of students and teachers, however, does not have in-depth knowledge of critical reading, what its elements are and how to develop it They are not even aware of the role of critical reading in the teaching and learning process This leads to quite lots of problems concerning behaviorism, self discovery and other cognitive matters The lack of a full awareness of critical reading may result in not only teachers’ clueing in and students’ knowledge acquiring but also curriculum design or teachers and students interaction in classroom, etc In the history of pedagogy, methodology, psychology and humanism, a variety of research on critical thinking and its related problems and solutions have been conducted In a very humble way, this research is aimed to follow the founding fathers of the field to bone up the most basic knowledge about critical thinking skill Next, because of the limitation of time as well as of the restrains on reference sources, the researcher will not cover up every aspect of critical thinking but just critical thinking in relation to the effective reading of first year students in English Department, College of Foreign Languages (CFL), Vietnam National University (VNU) As applying critical thinking skills in reading, students will become more effective readers who are capable of applying the given skills to achieve academic success in their language learning 1.2 An overview of reading course in English Division 1, English Department, CFL, VNU 2 1.2.1 Course objectives At the end of the course, first year students will be able to understand various average- level discourses such as magazine articles, letters, stories, etc and apply basic reading strategies including locating specific information (scanning), extracting main ideas (skimming), dealing with unfamiliar words, understanding author’s attitude, understanding text organization, understanding referencing devices and understanding text inferences Besides, the ability to deal with the following types of exercises such as true/ false, multiple choice, gap – fill, matching and open-ended questions and the ability to build up their background knowledge and vocabulary range through reading passages will also be attained To develop critical reading skills, it is very important to set up a range of objectives which aims at developing thinking process in reading skills In reality, out of seven objectives of Reading 2 mentioned above, only the last four ones relate to critical reading skills: understanding author’s attitude, understanding text organization, understanding referencing devices and understanding text inferences However, the activities and tasks used in the course do not help students meet those objectives (The analyses of the activities and tasks will be made in the analysis of the material from page 3-8.) 1.2.2 The syllabus (A detailed syllabus is provided in Appendix 1) The major strength of the syllabus is that it gives clear instructions to teachers and students on pieces of work they are expected to do every week This will help them be well prepared for class and that would increase the efficiency of teaching and learning Also, the syllabus saves the first week as an orientation week which is carried out in various forms such as formal lectures, discussions, debates, story telling, text reading or simply informal talks The benefits of orientation activities are: 1 creating opportunities for students and teachers and students themselves to get to know each other to exchange experiences, attitudes and opinions 2 orienting students towards college study methods in general and effective ways to learn the four language skills in particular Such preparation has been proved to respond to actual needs of students during their early days at college In addition, the syllabus gives space for the teachers to design or collect further reading by themselves Nevertheless, it is not an easy task due to time restraints and the lack of reference sources In the syllabus, there are three revision weeks Traditionally, teachers give students the tests of the previous years to do as a way of practicing reading under time pressure and developing examination skills In fact, this activity is relevant if the biggest purpose of the course is merely to get good marks in the exams However, if developing critical thinking and critical reading skills for students are also the aims of the syllabus, then more thought-provoking tasks and activities would have to be included 1.2.3 The critique of the material 3 ‘Practice your reading skills’ is the only in-use-textbook which is designed, adapted and combined by a group of teachers in the Division The use of only one course book in the whole semester may reduce the chances for students to experience different view points, beliefs and values, build up their own knowledge, reflect their attitudes, assumptions and even prejudices through comparing and examining which inevitably may bring about the biased, subjective way of thinking being the killer of critical thinking Therefore, introducing appropriate materials as supplementary to the main textbook is one of the researcher’s tasks in this study Followings is a brief overview of major strengths and weaknesses of the material a The strengths Comparing to the course objectives the syllabus is quite suitable The core course book ‘Practice your reading skills’ is a basic reading for pre-intermediate students of English Through 24 non-specialized theme-based units of the book and several extra activities, the reading course is aimed to develop the following reading skills for the students including getting the gist of a topic, drawing key concepts out of a reading, practicing reading strategies, learning how to use some clues for understanding Besides, it also fosters the interaction between the readers and the texts The core book contains informative, relevant and versatile texts, fun activity types, and varied vocabulary development materials Specially, there are numerous activities designed to develop students’ communicative competence, i.e the activities provide opportunities to incorporate listening, speaking and writing into the language lessons In the book, the activities which are at low thinking levels in Bloom’s Taxonomy are conducive to individual, pair and group work and are designed not to teach students to read but to guide students to practice reading skills As a result, the book can be used both for self-study and in the class room The topics were well - chosen to fit the themes of other three skills so students can practice the language again and again when speaking, listening, writing and reading The topics are interesting and relevant They can be practical and real as in ‘Language Learning’, ‘Jobs and Career’, etc but they can still be imaginative and brilliant as in ‘Achievers’ and ‘Science’ In general, the book can meet the general goal of the division for improving students’ reading skills Nonetheless, during the teaching and learning process, ‘Practice your reading skills’ has revealed a lot of problems b The weaknesses ‘Practice your reading skills’ is the only in-use-textbook which is designed, adapted and combined by a group of teachers in the Division The use of only one course book in the whole semester may reduce the chances for students to experience different view points, beliefs and values, build up their own knowledge, reflect their attitudes, assumptions and even prejudices through comparing and examining which inevitably may bring about the biased, subjective way of thinking being the killer of critical thinking Therefore, 4 introducing appropriate materials as supplementary to the main textbook is one of the researcher’s tasks in this study The first apparent problem is the gap between theoretical objectives and reality Being one of the four language courses in Division 1, reading must fit the objectives of the curriculum which attempts to reach the standard of the first level set by Cambridge University Local Examinations Syndicate That means after finishing the first year, students will reach the standard of PET level (pre-intermediate) However, the level is only suitable for listening and speaking skills Many first year students are so good at reading that they can easily finish the First Certificate reading texts Therefore, it is a real challenge to design a material that is able to fit the curriculum as well as students’ ability, interests and demands The book must contain multi-level reading texts from beginning to first certificate, from simple to more complicated Within this light, the content, is not cohesive because some texts and exercises are quite easy while some others are quite difficult and more advanced To fix the problem, teachers have to be flexible when using the material in class They have to design some extra activities and questions for the simple reading texts and simplify the difficult tasks by helping students with new words, giving the instructions carefully or asking students to work in group where strong students can help weaker ones with the difficult tasks The teachers can also classify the tasks by giving the more challenging tasks to stronger students and less difficult ones to weaker students The second problem area is the content of the material The text types in the material are quite variable, from short stories, specialized articles, reports, reviews, letters, advertisements to diagrams or pie charts The reading texts are quite different in level of difficulties and complication and used mostly to present or practice new language, general comprehension and information-finding To examine the content of the material carefully, the researcher has based on the two following categories: task types, stages of reading and possibility of combining with other skills (listening, speaking and writing) That action helps bring about the opportunities to comment on the criticalness of the material which will be discussed in the later part From what is shown in detailed syllabus and the list of task types and text types in each stage of reading as analyzed by the writer (for details, see Appendix 2 ), it is easy to make some comments as follow: + In ‘Practice your reading skills’ many units lack pre-reading and/or post-reading stages which seems against the attempt to develop critical reading skills gradually through the stages + The activities for the two stages are not diversified Mainly, students are asked to discuss/write about related issues after reading which leads to frequent practices of speaking / writing skills but the neglect of listening + The instructions of the activities are not clear enough + The material is not cohesive as there are some parts with much more critical content (Unit 21 – Art) than any other parts Besides, some instructions are so detailed that they become wordy 5 - ‘Criticalness’ (the portion or the percentage of being critical of the content of a material) To examine the criticalness of reading material, the researcher used three following criteria as suggested by Spiegel (1990:410) content validity, transfer potential and amount of reinforcement Content validity refers to how well the materials deliver what they promise or whether they are true to the rationale or theory that the materials purport to follow To assert that a material is critical means to prove its promotion of reflective thinking and strategic planning The core book of the course, nevertheless, does not absolutely meet that demand While being critical means being well-reasoned rather than having quick answers, along with some higher level (intermediate) tasks that do not have obvious solutions, there are numerous situations when students can easily find the answers to the questions Mostly, the material does not require students to pause, reflect, consider and ‘try out more than one hypothesis or attend to several factors before settling upon an answer’ (For the sample reading task of week two, see Appendix 3) Normally, the six main comprehensive questions are being successful tools for teachers to develop scanning skills of students Yet, in term of critical thinking development, they do not meet the intellectual demands of high level cognition skills and can only be categorized as Right There QARs whose answers are obvious in the text To answer this type of questions, students only have to use low level cognitive skills If it is to develop students’ critical reading skills, the book needs a lot of further improvements Among all ten units analyzed, there is only one passage in unit 21 – Arts that contains the ‘criticalness’ The activities require students not only to comprehend but also dig down into the author’s points, the referencing devices and the organization and purposes of the ideas The tasks given out also have a very close relationship with other critical and communication skills beside simple reading Doing the tasks, students have to write, reflect, express and compare Transfer potential involves the manner in which the students practices or uses the task of interest The second criterion, which involves exploring right or wrong answers, explaining divergent answers and identifying clue words, asks about three aspects: practicing, awareness and acceptance In the first place, students must be given opportunities to practice the transferring skills To beginners, this stage must be controlled by the teacher who has the responsibility of stating the connection between the text and other non verbal materials Besides, students are also instructed to know where to transfer and how to transfer In order to have a detailed plan to transfer, the material should be systematic and well-instructive Yet, the material lacks both features as it was designed without a consistent format and united language proficiency Some tasks are too easy, some others are too complicated Some types of exercises are too long and some are repeated Certain instructions are even incorrect in grammar and not clear enough to understand Moreover, the connection between the texts and other skills is not clear That leads to the lack of transferring the tasks and the knowledge 6 Amount of reinforcement is the provision of opportunities to apply new understanding in meaningful and interesting contexts This is considered more important for critical reading than other reading tasks To obtain this criterion, the material must be designed with variety of activities to develop analyzing skills, determining sequence, etc with variety of activities Some reading materials in the world which are accredited as good critical reading materials must have three to five activities accompanying with one unit The material, unfortunately, does not provide any other resource pack for the teacher as well as students All the time spent in class is for students to do the exercises and teachers to correct the answers If the teachers want to provide students with more extra tasks they will have to design themselves This work, however, is rather difficult for beginning teachers due to the restraint on time, money and professional supervision One more thing about the material is that it has no teacher’s manuals It is true that the teachers’ instructions, methods and behaviors play a very significant role in developing students critical reading skills The teacher’s manuals, therefore, will be a good professional help as they do not only bring in transparency matters for the lessons but the guidelines that assist teachers in many ways 1.2.4 Teachers Conventionally, all teachers in Division 1 are young which presumably means they do not have much experience in teaching in particular and in life in general However, they do possess certain advantages such as being enthusiastic, active, ready to apply new methods or think in new ways and adaptive to different situations They are also very hard- working The evidence is that they were continuously working very hard to produce all the materials used in the reading course Another notable point is that all teachers in Division 1 have graduated from CFL, VNU and many of them experienced the same non-cognition oriented reading materials as well as a curriculum with no subject named critical thinking when they were students Only a few ones graduating from fast track classes had chances to develop good thinking skills through their exposure to a learning environment where critical thinking is promoted 1.2.5 Students Generally, at high school, every week students only have one forty five minute-reading class and reading materials are poor in terms of quality The reading skills which are paid most attention to in the English syllabus at high school are scanning, skimming, guessing the meaning of new words and inferring Not only for reading for speaking, writing and listening skills as well, thought-provoking activities are seldom found in their textbook It is obvious that most first year students of English Department are well selected, and eager to learn since they all have to go through a very demanding entrance examination Among the four language skills taught in the first year, reading seems to be the strongest skill for most students because it was more frequently practiced when they were still at school to serve the main purpose of passing the university entrance examination However, once they have to learn how to read critically, reading is no longer too easy Usually in the orientation week, first year students have chances to express their own 7 opinions about reading and they all agree that reading is very important not only in English learning but also in any content class English is used as a medium Yet, hardly do they know about how to develop reading skill as a cognitive and communicative skill As well, they do not know how to combine different strategies in reading The effectiveness of learning reading skills, therefore, remains a big challenge for a large number of first year students 2 Aims of the study The research aims specifically at (1) investigating the attitudes of first year students and teachers toward critical reading; (2) exploring the problems that students encounter in studying and applying critical reading; (3) offering suitable teaching strategies in developing critical reading skills for first year students 3 Scope of the study Being an action research on first year students’ and teachers’ critical reading skills, the study is confined to critical thinking skill in reading of first year students in English Department, CFL, VNU In other words, the research will help raise the awareness of first year students in the university towards the necessity of building up and developing critical reading skills With the manageable population and variants of fifty students and ten teachers in Division 1, English Department, CFL, VNU, the research will hopefully contribute to the improvement of teaching and learning methods as well as the advancement of the students’ cognitive ability 4 Organization of the paper Apart from Introduction (Part 1) and Conclusions (Part 3), the research is divided into three chapters: - Chapter 1 presents Literature Review It gives an overview of most updated theories on critical thinking, critical reading and issues related to teaching critical reading - Chapter 2 deals with Methodology which demonstrates the data collection instruments and the procedure of the experiment - Chapter 3 namely Data analysis, Discussion of major findings and Recommendations reports the results of the investigation into the reality of teaching and learning critical reading in Division 1, CFL, VNU In this chapter, answers to the two research questions are also given The answers are also the major findings which help the research find a practical basis for further recommendations 5 Method of the study This will be an action research which provides many opportunities for the researcher to test the theories as well as applications in reality As a result, the most appropriate ways of developing critical reading skills will be reached - Research questions 1 What are the students’ attitudes to critical thinking and critical reading skills? 8 2 What are the problems first year students face when developing critical thinking in general and critical reading in particular? 3 How do critical thinking and critical reading strategies help to improve students’critical thinking and critical reading? - Participants The participants includetwo groups of 07E students Division 1, English Department, CFL, VNU which are the subjects of the study and ten teachers of Division 1, English Department who are the respondents Data collection instruments contain semi-structured interviews, observation and experiment 9 part 2 development Chapter 1 Literature Review This chapter reviews the most basic knowledge of critical thinking, critical reading, the relationship between critical thinking and critical reading and different aspects of teaching critical reading 1 An overview of critical thinking 1.1 The definition of critical thinking Terminologically, critical thinking has been defined in various ways Chance (1986 : 6) defined critical thinking as ‘the ability to analyze facts, generate and organize ideas, defend opinions, make comparisons, draw inferences, evaluate arguments and solve problems’ while Mertes (1991 : 24) characterized critical thinking as ‘a conscious and deliberate process which is used to interpret or evaluate information and experiences with a set of reflective attitudes and abilities that guide thoughtful beliefs and actions’ Such a difference results from the continuous changes in psychology and philosophy theories In 1996, Scriven and Paul described critical thinking as the intellectually disciplined process of actively and skillfully conceptualizing, applying, analyzing, synthesizing, and/or evaluating information gathered from, or generated by, observation, experience, reflection, reasoning, or communication, as a guide to belief and action (p 12) Though sounding relatively similar in some ways with the two definitions given by Chance(1986) and Mertes (1991), this comprehensive definition got much attention from scholars of the field because of its clarity and validity To be more exact, Scriven and Paul just figured out the natural feature of critical thinking as an active and practice-required thinking process including distinctive cognitive behaviors In Vietnam, many people tend to have a negative view toward the common meaning of the word ‘critical’ For them, if someone is critical, he is likely to question, to judge severely and ready to find faults about things and people around Therefore, in their opinion, critical thinkers seem doubtful and never satisfied However, the concept “critical” is more widely known in the modern world today as “giving careful, exact evaluation and judgments” (Cambridge Advanced Learners’ Dictionary) Those evaluation and judgments result from inquisitive questions and doubt which are principal tools and motivation for critical thinkers to seek truth Accordingly, the quality of thinking and doing is heightened In this regard, the meaning of the word “critical” is definitely interpreted with a positive sense However, critical thinking does not assure that one will always reach either the truth or correct conclusions Such cases happen when one does not have all the relevant information, or makes unjustified inferences, uses inappropriate concepts, or may be a victim of prejudices or biases Then, “having a critical spirit is as important as thinking critically” (Norris, 1985: 31) The critical spirit does not only consist of the ability to 10 think critically but also accepts the fact that reality can be much more difficult or different and the solutions can be all wrong, then the effort to search for new solutions will always be encouraged The critical spirit requires one to consider all aspects of life, to reckon not only one's own but others’ thinking, and “to act on the basis of what one has considered when using critical thinking skills.” Norris (1985:44) Naturally, critical thinking is skeptical When people think something over, they ask questions about its validity, reliability as well as possibility Just like what Shakespeare stated ‘to survive means to be skeptical’, skepticism helps things move on and develop If things are easily accepted without questioning or testing, they will never be renewed, upgraded or renovated Conventionally, critical thinking is considered different from other kinds of thinking such as lateral thinking (a way of solving a problem by thinking about it imaginatively and originally and not using traditional or expected methods), creative thinking (putting facts, concepts and principles together in new and original ways) and reflective thinking (carefully analyzing thinking) Some experts put critical thinking in a parallel and corresponding position with other thinking skills The research conductor, however, reckons that critical thinking is overall moderator of almost every other thinking skill That means a critical thinker is accomplished in the flexible use of cognition skills In other words, critical thinking not only helps improve people’s cognitive skills but also helps them improve their adaptability and flexibility to master their own lives To be more concrete, a critical thinker will be the one who knows when, where, why and how to use one, some or all of the thinking skills effectively To sum up, critical thinking refers to the active, conscious mental process which employs general principles and procedure of thinking to seek truth and judgments 1.2 The elements of critical thinking The question of what the elements of critical thinking are remains controversial depending on different research criteria The classification given in this part is based upon most commonly accepted categorization of critical thinking elements in literature In this regard, critical thinking is comprised of two basic complex elements: the cognitive skills and the affective dispositions 1.2.1 Cognitive skills In the history of research on education and pedagogy, various ways to categorize cognitive skills have been explored Among all, the most common way is to base on the taxonomy which was first developed in 1956 by Benjamin Bloom and revised in 2001 by Anderson, & Krathwohl According to the taxonomy, within three overlapping domains: the cognitive, psychomotor and affective, the thinking process is divided into six levels in a hierarchical order from the lowest to the highest one The first level is knowledge (including facts, ideas, terms, concepts, etc.) which is obtained through communication, observation, senses and so on According to www.eduscapes.com, knowledge level may contain collecting, defining, describing, identifying, showing, naming, recording, reading, copying, quoting and selecting which ... exploring the problems that students encounter in studying and applying critical reading; (3) offering suitable teaching strategies in developing critical reading skills for first year students. .. Scope of the study Being an action research on first year students? ?? and teachers’ critical reading skills, the study is confined to critical thinking skill in reading of first year students in English. .. knowledge of critical thinking, critical reading, the relationship between critical thinking and critical reading and different aspects of teaching critical reading An overview of critical thinking