다음 아티클은 제가 2015년 10월 한국의 코엑스에서 개최된 KOTESOL 칸퍼런스에서 발표한 내용입니다.

Academic Writing, Promoting Speaking Listening Reading and Critical Thinking

Eun-Jung (EJ) Brown

University of Texas at Arlington, United States of America

Instead of overwhelming ESL students with directions, by giving them tools they need for academic writing they can cultivate their own critical thinking. Using four different techniques to develop the critical thinking skills of factual, insightful, rational, and evaluative thinking, ESL students in pairs or small groups will engage in survey activity, data analysis, conducting research, and finally, writing an academic essay.

I.               Introduction

Academic writing and critical thinking skills are the most challenging areas for ESL students.  Not only do they have language barriers such as lack of academic vocabulary and complex sentence structures to deliver more sophisticated ideas, typical ESL students do not yet have the ability to think for themselves. Hence, when these ESL students face the task of academic writing, they do not know what to do or how to develop their academic skills. By introducing academic writing in pairs or groups in the beginning and by empowering students with tools, teachers can provide a safe environment to develop critical thinking skills and the daunting task of writing academically can be less intimidating and enjoyable.  In this presentation, teachers will learn step by step how to develop a 2-week writing project for students with academic purposes and how to incorporate speaking, listening, reading, and writing in an ESL writing class.

II.            Background

ESL students in general have a hard time with critical thinking, which is an essential part of academic writing. Typically, student comments about academic writing and critical thinking skills resonate with “difficult” or “boring” but combining different areas of academic skills can be fun and exciting if the students play an active role and participate using their own interests.

In her TESOL president’s blog, Questioning Techniques to Engage Students in Critical Thinking (2014), Dr. Yulin Sun summarized four areas of thinking to cultivate critical thinking skills in ESL students including factual, insightful, rational, and evaluative thinking.  For example, students question themselves about what facts are, what those facts mean, how they are related, and why they are important. Using these techniques, teachers can create a writing project based on students’ interests and guide them through a group writing project.

From another perspective, according to Think On (2013), a student that exhibits critical thinking will demonstrate the following behaviors: 1. Investigate and evaluate multiple sources of information, 2. Recognize perspectives, assumptions, and biases, 3. Synthesize the information received from various sources, 4. Analyze information, and 5. Communicate conclusions. This research and writing project requires students to demonstrate every one of these critical thinking behaviors.

III.          Implementation

To begin, students in pairs or small groups choose their own interest area within the topic given by their teacher and then create a survey. Each group will independently decide which sub-topic they choose and later share their outcomes with other the groups in class. By gathering information through their survey, students will develop factual and insightful thinking. Then students analyze their collected data and draw rational conclusions. Using evaluative thinking, the last technique for developing critical thinking, students write a five paragraph group essay using the writing process and peer-editing. The teachers’ role in this project will be choosing members for each group based on culture, academic skills, and gender, providing general topics and guiding through the research and writing process. Every step of this project is based on the student group’s decisions.

As an example, the teacher could assign the general topic of education. One group might choose to learn about grading systems in American universities. This group would create a survey of questions about the topic, perhaps questions about how professors assign grades, course requirements for grades, etc. The student group would then take the survey and interview fellow students (Critical Thinking: Analyze information). After gathering the information in the interviews, the ESL student group would then find two additional sources of information about the topic to which to compare their findings. The data from these interviews and the additional sources would form the basis for their paper (Critical Thinking: Investigate and evaluate multiple sources of information Recognize perspectives, assumptions, and biases). Each student would be responsible to write approximately two to three paragraphs in the final essay, an amount that is not overwhelming to relatively new learners. The students would edit the paragraphs from the other members of their group and bring the material together into a single coherent essay (Critical Thinking: Synthesize information from various sources Communicate conclusions).

IV.          Observations and Conclusions

Before the actual final writing, students have to use all areas of English such as speaking, listening, and reading to communicate in their group as well as finding the additional sources. By choosing a single topic to be shared by multiple students that use different languages, students must use English to interact both inside and outside the classroom. In order to create survey questions together, they have to come up with ideas together and reach an agreement. After that, they have to do research about their topic and read articles to explain what they found through their survey. Throughout the process, students practice all of the skills that form the foundation of critical thinking.

References

Sun, Y. (2014, June 4). Questioning Techniques to Engage Students in Critical Thinking. Retrieved from http://blog.tesol.org/questioning-techniques-to-engage-students-in-critical-thinking/

Texas Wesleyan University (2013). Think On: Thinking Critically Quality Enhancement Plan.

The Author

Eun-Jung (EJ) Brown was born in Seoul, Korea and graduated from Kyung Hee University with a BA in English Education in 1991. After 6 years of teaching EFL in Seoul, she went to America to learn and teach “real English”.  EJ got her Master’s degree in TESOL from the State University of New York at Stony Brook in 1998. After teaching ESL at Missouri State University for 2 years, she moved to Texas and has been teaching for 10 years at the ELI at the University of Texas at Arlington as a senior instructor. She has published 11 books about how to have fun while learning English through YBM, LogIn, and NewRun in Korea, and 4 of her books have been translated in China and Taiwan.