Critical Thinking is paired by Department for Education policy with English as an Additional Language in Indonesian secondary contexts. While listening, speaking, reading and writing are viewed as core skills in English as an Additional Language teaching and learning, the over-reliance on reading and writing limits the opportunities for students to think critically when listening to other students and speaking English. This research thus reports a study that determined in-service teacher perceptions about, and documents for, facilitating Critical Thinking in student listening and speaking tasks across Years 10 to 12 in an Indonesian high school. Teacher interview and document data sets in this study were compared to published data, comprising observations of the same teachers and their classes. This study revealed that there was a substantial lack of alignment between the teachers’ perceptions and their teaching documents when compared to the observations of practices. Perceptions and documents evidenced that the teachers were aware of the policy drivers for facilitating Critical Thinking in student listening and speaking tasks. However, the published data revealed sparse evidence of student Critical Thinking when listening to and speaking English. Whilst rare, student Critical Thinking that was in evidence was rich, multi-faceted and dynamic, and warrants further studies to investigate the development and implementation in listening and speaking pedagogies and related assessments. Better alignment is required between the competing ‘Critical Thinking in English as an Additional Language’ policy within both pre-service and in-service teacher professional learning.

Authors:
Ricky Fernandes, The University of Adelaide, Australia

About the Presenter(s)
Ricky Fernandes finished his PhD from The University of Adelaide, Australia, focusing on teacher facilitation of Critical Thinking in English as an Additional Language, especially in the areas of listening and speaking skills.

Connect on Linkedin
https://www.linkedin.com/in/ricky-fernandes-89701b73/

See this presentation on the full schedule – Friday Schedule

Bookmark