The use of critical thinking in vocabulary teaching.
Seeing critical thinking as a complex process, some questions arise naturally. One of them for example is the level of English skills learners need, before they are ready to actually use critical thinking. The answer comes with the definition of what critical thinking actually is. Critical thinking is the intellectually disciplined process of actively and skilfully remembering, understanding, applying, analysing, evaluating and creating gathered from, or generated by, observation, experience, reflection, reasoning, or communication, as a guide to belief and action. This process is also considered as hierarchy for teachers. So the learners need to acquire these skills before they efficiently use critical thinking in their learning process.
Critical thinking helps us link the already familiar with known language in order to reflect on what we know and what we need to know.
Let us consider vocabulary. There are 600.000 words in the official Oxford Dictionary. In order to comprehend 98% of a given text and to be able to accurately understand most of the rest, a person should know about 5000 word families in the English language. Teachers usually worry about how much a student is going to remember because of the huge amount. But here is when critical thinking comes in hand. When being addressed to a new list of words a student uses critical thinking in order to group words that sound the same or mean the same in different lists. this is a good way to help them remember better and use them in the wanted context. They also try to arrange them in other lists by what actually brings them together. By this they have analysed, perceived patterns, engaged in problem solving, cooperation and evaluation. These newly acquired patterns and words, should be used between 6-10 times in different ways to be stored in the long-term memory. By this short example we get that critical thinking works by learning new concepts in the exact same way that our brain is wired.
Feel free to leave your comments below,
Critical thinking helps us link the already familiar with known language in order to reflect on what we know and what we need to know.
Let us consider vocabulary. There are 600.000 words in the official Oxford Dictionary. In order to comprehend 98% of a given text and to be able to accurately understand most of the rest, a person should know about 5000 word families in the English language. Teachers usually worry about how much a student is going to remember because of the huge amount. But here is when critical thinking comes in hand. When being addressed to a new list of words a student uses critical thinking in order to group words that sound the same or mean the same in different lists. this is a good way to help them remember better and use them in the wanted context. They also try to arrange them in other lists by what actually brings them together. By this they have analysed, perceived patterns, engaged in problem solving, cooperation and evaluation. These newly acquired patterns and words, should be used between 6-10 times in different ways to be stored in the long-term memory. By this short example we get that critical thinking works by learning new concepts in the exact same way that our brain is wired.
Feel free to leave your comments below,
I like your job, it is well organized , and example you have given with the number of words and how critical thinking helps in this case, good point of view 😊 .
ReplyDeleteThe way you have explained the role of critical thinking in teaching vocabulary is clearly explained. I really like your post. Good job!
ReplyDeleteYour blog is helpful and interesting in the same way. I really enjoyed it a lot . Keep going 😊
ReplyDeleteI like the way that you have organized the information. It was clear and informative. Your work is great as always.
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