چکیده:
This study attempted to examine the extent to which university instructors contributed as obstacles or facilitators to developing critical thinking skills in undergraduate, graduate, and doctorate students. To this end, six university classes, two classes from each of the above-mentioned programs, were selected randomly from the Department of Foreign Languages and Linguistics in a State University. The corpus of the study was collected via video recordings during a semester. Vygotsky’s (1978) sociocultural theory was utilized to interpret the data. The results revealed that instructors in BA and one of MA classes were facilitators of critical thinking skills, while those in the other MA class and both Ph.D. classes acted more as obstacles to such skills. This finding contradicted the expectations of the researcher who, based on Fisher’s (2005) arguments, believed that thinking skills should be more developed at tertiary levels by instructors, particularly as one moves from bachelor to master and doctoral levels, which are more about frontiers of knowledge. The implications of the study pointed to the vital role of the university instructors in promoting thinking skills by decreasing interruptions, increasing wait-time, asking referential questions, and using selective repair.
خلاصه ماشینی:
Department of TEFL, University of Hormozgan, Bandar Abbas, Iran Abstract This study attempted to examine the extent to which university instructors contributed as obstacles or facilitators to developing critical thinking skills in undergraduate, graduate, and doctorate students.
Nevertheless, several investigations (Chew & Hamad, 2018; Ghanizadeh, 2017; Yen, & Halili, 2015) have uncovered that the teaching activities observed in the classroom may not induce higher-order thinking skills, even if in some learning settings teachers claim to be practicing thinking strategies as Li (2016) has argued: The primary responsibility that learners take in learning a second language requires learners not only to remember and recall expression in its abstract form simply but to engage in critical and creative analysis and evaluation of material at hand to internalize the language.
Several studies (Guan, & Gao, 2019; Li, 2016; Song, Oh, & Rice, 2017;) illustrate the importance of dialogic discussions as the comments of the participants facilitate the process of obtaining more information, solve problems related to understanding, and open spaces for evaluation and reflection (Montegomery & Baxter, 1998, Wegerif, 2006).
Based on Vygotsky’s (1978) sociocultural theory of learning, it attempted to illustrate to what extent university instructors in the Department of Foreign Languages and Linguistics at an Iranian University, acted as facilitators or obstacles to developing thinking through classroom interactions in BA, MA, and Ph. D.
classes, the university instructors provided students with fewer opportunities for interaction, discussion, and consequently the development of thinking skills.