Strategies of Improving College English Education Through Developing Thinking Sk
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Abstract:Thinking skills is a common expression which includes a series of process of learning and discovering the solutions of problems and issues. This article is based on the ideas of “new integrated framework for understanding thinking and learning” and the relations between language teaching and “cognitive domain”, some practical strategies are put forward to improve the quality of college English education.
Key words:college English develop thinking skills language learning
Bloom (1956) classified cognitive abilities into six levels which include “knowledge” (remembering and recalling of what learned before), “comprehension” (understanding of what are learned), “application”(constructing understanding of what learned to deal with a different situation), “analysis”(thinking critically what are learned before and have a clear ideas among different facts or knowledge), “synthesis”(formulating and combining previous knowledge to make something clear) and “Evaluation”(make a decision or judgment of something for certain purpose, involve the usage of standards or certain criteria).
Later on, Moseley et al (2004) put forward a new “integrated framework for understanding thinking and learning”, including the cognitive skills of “information gathering”, “building understanding” and “productive thinking”, which are based on some frameworks related to Bloom’s (1956) taxonomy. This framework can be viewed as a “two level structure” since it could help both teachers and students to plan their teaching and learning, as well as available for students to build up the abilities of information accumulating, understanding constructing and developing cognitive and metacognitive knowingness.
Education is a practical activity which is relevant to the aim of developing students’ intelligence and ability during the procedure of passing and acquiring knowledge. And according to Bereiter (2002), education is the process of accepting and introducing new things into mind or altering the thoughts of old things which are already in mind. College English education in China aims to enhance the English skills of students and develop their ability of English acquiring, and have a deeper understanding of English language.
Brown (1995) pointed out that the “cognitive domain” (Bloom 1956) can be related to the knowledge and skills of the language which is taught to the students. And he also claimed that the “cognitive goals” could be defined as “language goals” in the language teaching (Brown 1995). By combining some frameworks related to Bloom’s (1956) taxonomy, Moseley et al (2004) created a new integrated framework for understanding thinking and learning which includes of cognitive skills of “information gathering”, “building understanding” and “productive thinking”.
First, teachers could require students to memorize some useful new words and phrase as a compulsory task, and they also can ask students themselves to select words or sentences from school texts, so they could have enough vocabularies for further understanding and learning. At the beginning of every class, either teacher dictates these words and sentences or asks some students to tell the rest of class what words and sentences they select from the passage and the reasons why they select. On the other hand, students should use some certain words to make sentences in order to get a better understanding. But, how can the teacher evaluate the efforts and assignment student make? Teachers can check these assignments irregularly in order to guarantee that every student does the tasks more or less. When the students have sufficient ability and enough words, they could be asked to write some short articles in English, but they can write any topic they want to choose so they have a wide choice of topic to think about. Then, teacher should correct these passages and find out their weak points to improve their writing skills as well as teach them how to write article in English. It should not a tough task for students to do, because all the students have learned English for many years before the enter the colleges and universities and they already have basic knowledge of English, some students even know more words and can speak a fluent English.
Second, teachers should encourage students to ask questions as much as possible, because some certain kinds of question can help and develop thinking in that particular subject (Hargreaves & Moyles 2002). Students should be allowed to ask any questions related to English language and the passages they read or the assignments they do, so they could know what is right and what is wrong, especially for the questions about grammar, or the sentence structures. Because their mother language has another grammatical system which has huge differences from English language, they need to consider these differences when they learn another foreign language and find out a better and appropriate method to learn the new language. With the help of teacher, they could accumulate more knowledge of English and have a clearer concept of English learning. Under this circumstance, the role of teacher is essential as a guide for students to learn the certain rules of English language, build conceptual knowledge of English in order to have their own ideas of learning English.
Then, teachers should follow the new requirements of college English curriculum to develop students’ abilities, and consider students’ skills of reading, writing, listening and speaking. However, making them pass the exams is not the only purpose, what the teachers do is to develop and enhance students’ comprehensive abilities. The traditional way is to give students many exams papers and exercise to do, which should be replaced by another better and effective way. From my own perspective, “productive thinking” (Moseley et al 2004) is a key point to this strategy. Students already learned a lot of knowledge on English at this stage. They have to be at an advanced or a certain level in order to have a command of English. Teachers not only give exam papers to students to do, but also need to give them enough time and freedom to do other activities related to English learning, exams should not be the most important task to do. Besides doing few papers, teacher should utilize other methods to develop their thinking skills of language learning. For instance, watching or listening interesting English programme, communicating with foreigners face to face.Through these activities, students not only can really use English in real life, but also can understand what they learn and how they can make full use of the knowledge to solve problems in different situations. As a result, they could have a proper attitude toward exams and more spare time on other subjects..
At last, English teachers also need to advance their abilities through various approaches, like participating certain training programmes, exchanging with other teachers from different schools, and attending related seminars. Currently, the qualities and qualifications of English teachers are various which influence college English teaching. Some universities even hire graduate students, who do not have enough teaching experience or teaching certificates, to teach undergraduate students
However, these strategies should be applied in different situations and depends on the English level of students. Should teacher need to let students gain more information of English, or they can make students organise what they learned previous to reach a higher level? It is the job of teachers to guide students to find out their level and explore their potential in order to develop their thinking skills on language learning.
Based on the above analysis, some strategies could be useful for improving the quality of college english education, which are following the ideas of “new integrated framework for understanding thinking and learning”. Teachers should pay more attention on teaching students learn a foreign language and create opportunities to useand practise English freely in order to develop their ability of thinking and problem solving, as well as cognitive and metacognitive skills to know how and what they learn about English. And it is teachers’ obligation to acquire more updated foreign language pedagogy to adapt appropriately to their teaching context, and to take relevant training..
Reference:
Bloom, B.S. & Krathwohl, D.R. & Masia, B.B. (1956). Taxonomy of Educational Objectives: Cognitive Domain. New York: Mckay.
Brown, James Dean. (1995). The Elements of Language Curriculum: A Systematic Approach to Program Development. Boston: Heinle & Heinle Publishers.
Mcgregor, Debre. (2007). Developing Thinking Developing Learning: Aguide to Thinking Skills in Education. Berkshire: Open University Press.
Robson, Sue. & David Moseley. (2005). An Integrated Frame for Thinking About Learning. In Belle Wallace (Ed). Gifted Education International (pp36-50). Oxon: A B Academic Publisher.