Next Journey
This section summarizes how my
experiences have helped me formulate ideas for my dissertation and
future research.
As highlighted in the
Research section, I began my research at IU by further investigating the lower-level language
process, or encoding/decoding, to verify and expand on the insights and
questions that I had
carried with me from Chiang Mai University through qualitative,
qualitative and mixed research. Research on factors, problems,
and how to provide scaffolds in EFL reading still remains important
to me now and is on my list for further research.
At IU, entering the new fields, namely
critical literacy and critical pedagogy, I was constantly trying to see
how they would fit in EFL contexts. I was in love with the concept that
language reflects much more than the immediate literal meaning of words,
phrases, or sentences. It conveys how people view themselves and
the world round them, how they position themselves and others, how it
serves
their purposes, how it can be used as a tool for transformative thinking and
actions, etc. Hence, I became convinced that learning and teaching a language, should
enable the learners to see these interconnected dimensions.
Critical pedagogy is at the roots
of critical literacy and critical thinking, and all of
these ideologies have sociopolitical goals of reaching a better
world in the name of different Western notions, such as social
justice, democracy, being critically literate, mutual respect,
multiple perspectives, challenging the status quo, and so on. While
they all made sense to me, I continued to struggle for ways of
integrating them in EFL pedagogy, mainly because I found no clear
model or method for successful teaching under these terms. As mentioned in the previous paragraph,
neither consensus nor well-defined framework for practices was given
to practitioners; different people were claiming and doing various
things. Critical literacy is a general term used by
different people in different contexts with varied details of
actions and even for diverse
goals. In essence, there are no clear methods of teaching as in TESOL methodology, of which a number of approaches and methods are
virtually uniformly recognized and practiced by people of the field, i.e. Grammar
Translation Method, Direct Method, Communicative Approach, etc.
Later, I noticed the
term 'critical thinking' as one of the most common words in the U.S.
educational discourse. Thus, I tried to see how it was being
defined and taught. Indeed, critical
thinking is pretty much a separate field from critical literacy and
critical pedagogy, having its own authors, some guidelines for
practices, and audiences. However, I could see some overlapping
ideologies among them. Since critical literacy and
its roots, critical pedagogy, were originated in contexts outside
the TESOL field and have been predominantly practiced in L1
context, I felt the need to find some clear framework for
implementing these ideologies in EFL/ESL classes, and I think
critical thinking might provide some useful framework. In a practical sense, Bloom's taxonomy,
which lies as foundation for critical thinking practices, seems to address the
need for cognitive activities at higher level, namely analysis,
synthesis, and evaluation, which are of importance in the practice
of critical literacy/pedagogy, in which the learners are encouraged to see
the worlds hidden in words. In essence, one can use critical
thinking skills to learn to be critically literate as people in
critical literacy or critical pedagogy wish to see, essentially
because critical thinking also addresses sociopolitical issues.
Many questions also arose.
How can EFL teachers in contexts like Thailand compromise between
the need to work on linguistic gaps and the need to unpack issues
and systems beyond words. How universal are such common Western
discourses such as social justice, respect, multiple perspectives,
challenging the status quo, democracy and so on? How are these
notions viewed by teachers and students in the East and particularly
in Thailand? The most compelling question is how can these
notions be best taught in EFL context of Thailand? I have
explored the literature on using critical thinking in EFL classes
and found very few studies. Out of the literature that I have
approached so far, much is addressed in other fields, not TEFL.
Interestingly, the questions surrounding cultural relativism, East
vs. West, local and universal factors related to how people think
critically and yet differently are also addressed by Thai educators,
too.
Given the limited work on how
critical thinking is integrated in EFL teaching in Thailand, I see
the need to conduct an exploratory study centered around the
following questions:
- How do teachers and
students in EFL classes see the need to practice critical
thinking in English classes? How do they perceive the
expectations of language education policy in Thailand?
- How much do teachers
think they already know about critical thinking? How do
they see it, in comparison with the Western sense? How were
teachers trained to teach critical thinking?
- Is critical thinking
actually practiced in EFL classes? In what forms? How much and
how?
- What are obstacles and
positive factors found by those who tried to promote it?
- How relative is critical
thinking in Thailand to its local culture as versus to the
Western sense? What can teacher trainers learn from the
potentially complex scenarios?
- If the Westernized (to be
defined) critical thinking is introduced to EFL teachers in
Thailand, how do teachers modify it to suit their context?
What can we, teacher trainers and researchers, learn from them?
Three Tentative Prospectuses
I have developed a few prospectuses for my dissertation, but, given
the circumstances, it appears that I will pursue the third one from
the list below.
-
"Critical thinking in EFL Classroom in Thailand: The
East-Meet-West dynamics and their implications" (I planned to
collect the data in Thailand, but the learned later that I am
not allowed to leave my family here in the U.S. for longer than
one month, so I changed my mind.)
-
"Distance
education instructors' metacognitive quantity and quality and
their relationships with the knowledge construction patterns and
student satisfaction"
(I planned to collect the data during Fall, but, since I will be
in Afghanistan, this option has to be abandoned.)
-
"The
complexity and politics of ELT reform in Afghanistan"
(Please see the tentative prospectus attached. I am still
working on the detailed proposal and human subject clearance.)
