İNGİLİZCE OKUTMANLARIN ELEŞTİREL DÜŞÜNME BECERİLERİNE İLİŞKİN ALGILARI VE DENEYİMLERİ ÜZERİNE BİR ÇALIŞMA
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Abstract
Bu çalışmanın amacı, İngilizce öğretim elemanlarının eleştirel düşünme konusundaki farkındalıklarını ve algılarını incelemek ve eleştirel düşünme uygulamalarının İngilizce öğretiminde kullanılmasına dair deneyimlerine ilişkin fikir edinmektedir. Bu amaç doğrultusunda, bu araştırma, Konya'daki iki farklı üniversite bünyesinde Yabancı Diller Yüksekokullarında çalışan 15 okutmanın katılımıyla gerçekleşmiştir. Eleştirel düşünme uygulamaları üzerine öğretmen algılarını ve deneyimlerini araştırmayı hedefleyen bu çalışma, karma yöntem araştırmadır ve veriler, tüm katılımcıların tamamladığı bir anket formu ve ardından dört öğretim elemanı ile gerçekleştirilen yarı yapılandırılmış görüşmeler yoluyla toplanmıştır. Bulgular, öğretmenlerin eleştirel düşünmeyi yabancı dil öğretim müfredatına entegre etmeye yönelik iyimserliğini ortaya koymakta ve eleştirel düşünme pedagojilerini benimsediğini ve eleştirel düşünme algılarının sınıf içindeki uygulamalarını etkilediğini göstermektedir. Fakat diğer yandan öğretmenler, eleştirel düşüncenin yabancı dil öğretimine dahil edilmesi gerektiğine inansa da, eleştirel düşünme becerilerini geliştirmeye yönelik uygulamalarda çoğunlukla öğrencilerden kaynaklanan bir takım zorluklar yaşadıklarını dile getirmektedirler.
Keywords
Abstract
The purpose of this exploratory study was to examine instructors’ awareness and perceptions of critical thinking within the field of ELT and their experiences of teaching English in relation to critical thinking. Thus, the study employed a mixed-methods approach to investigating teacher perceptions and experiences with the participation of 15 instructors working at School of Foreign Languages at two different universities in Konya, Turkey. The data were gathered through a questionnaire which all the participants completed, and semi-structured interviews with four teachers. The findings reveal teachers’ optimism for integrating critical thinking into the ELT curriculum, and show that they adopt critical thinking pedagogies and THAT their perceptions of critical thinking influence their practises in the classroom. It has also been found out that although teachers strongly believe that critical thinking should be incorporated into teaching a foreign language, they find it demanding and meet several barriers to teaching critical thinking, mostly set by their learners.
Keywords
- MA in ELT Private 4 26 Female English Language Data Collection Tools and Procedure The first purpose of the study was to reveal some insights into instructors’ existing perceptions and experiences of critical thinking within a Turkish context. As mentioned earlier, there are few studies regarding how Turkish instructors of English perceive critical thinking in language teaching and to what extent they encourage critical thinking with their instructional practices. In this sense, this study aimed to focus on gaining insights into and familiarity with the present issue and provide a preliminary stage for further investigation of the issue. Taking into account of the purpose and focus of the research, an exploratory design was deemed appropriate for the study. The research questions and the nature of this research design required to employ both quantitative and qualitative methods in order to collect data. All the participants were supposed to complete a questionnaire which produced both qualitative and quantitative data (See Appendix A). The questionnaire consists of four parts. The first part includes 3 open-ended questions designed by the researcher herself in order to investigate teachers’ awareness of what critical thinking is. The second and third parts of the questionnaire contain a total of 30 Likert type items with 5 points in which the participants were asked to rank the statements from strongly disagree to strongly agree in the second part and from very often to never in the third part. The second part of the questionnaire concerns teachers’ perceptions of critical thinking whereas the third part regards teachers’ experiences of critical thinking. Several items in both these parts were taken and adapted from some previous studies conducted outside the Turkish settings (See Choy and Cheah, 2009; Ketabi et.al, 2012) and the researcher also benefitted from the resources offered by the Critical Thinking Community website to develop more questionnaire items. The questionnaire was designed carefully to seek answers to the first three research questions of the study. Following the questionnaire, semi-structured interviews in English were carried out with four instructors chosen purposefully with the aim of both shedding more light on some striking points revealed by the analysis of questionnaire and seeking answers to the last two research questions of the study. Following the same way of preparing questionnaire items, the researcher benefitted from the previous studies (See Choy and Cheah, 2009; Ketabi et.al, 2012) and the resources on the website of the Critical Thinking Community in order to develop interview questions. Both the questionnaire and interview questions were piloted with and revised by two people before the study was conducted. One of them was the researcher’s lecturer who works as an assistant professor and the other was her colleague who is currently a PhD candidate and works as a research assistant in the institution in which the researcher works. They provided some valuable suggestions on the content, organization and wording of the items and questions. After piloting and adjusting the instruments, the researcher set out to conduct the study. The researcher first conducted the questionnaire and then held face-to-face interviews with four participants. Each interview lasted almost 8 minutes. They were recorded through a voice-recorder, and some notes were also taken by the interviewer. The conversations were fully transcribed for coding and data analysis. These in-depth interviews elaborated on teachers’ perceptions and instructional practises in relation to critical thinking. During the interviews, ways of encouraging and integrating critical thinking into language teaching and barriers to achieving this were specifically addressed in order to seek possible answers to the fourth and fifth research questions. Data Analysis Following a mixed-methods approach to investigating language instructors’ perspectives and experiences of teaching critical thinking, the study produced both quantitative and qualitative data by means of the questionnaire and interviews. The quantitative data taken from the interview were statistically analysed and frequencies of the responses were described. As for the qualitative data gathered from the first part of the questionnaire, the responses were examined through content analysis. The second set of qualitative data was produced by 8-minute interviews conducted with four participants and recorded through a voice-recorder. The interview provided some interpretive data, so all the conversations were fully transcribed and content analysis was conducted for in-depth examination of the data. After carefully reviewing these transcriptions and outlining the responses of the interviewees under the light of the research questions, salient points and recurring themes were identified, and labels were assigned to them. A variety of codes regarding each interview question were generated and the codes that seemed to be connected with each other were categorized (Saldana, 2009). The labels assigned to the data and their categorisations were checked by another researcher to ensure consistency in the categorization of the data. Later the transcriptions were reviewed again and a few more excerpts were though relevant to the codes and categorized. Treating the participants and data in accordance with the interview protocol, the researcher gave a code number to each interviewee (as Int1, Int2, Int3 and Int4) and presented the findings by referring to these code numbers in order to guarantee their anonymity. Briefly, this content analysis process involved a set of steps as such; repeated reading of the data, detailed interpretation of responses, identification of common themes emerging from the data, coding these themes, and categorising these codes and testing the applicability of codes to interpret the data, and revising codes and categories throughout the analysis. Findings and Discussion In this chapter, the findings drawn from the questionnaire and interviews are provided following the order of the research questions of the study. In line with this, it is useful to look over the research questions presented earlier. Findings of the Questionnaire The questionnaire which was designed to investigate instructors’ awareness and perceptions of critical thinking and their teaching experiences in relation to critical thinking included four parts and, the questionnaire yielded both quantitative and qualitative data. The reliability of the scale estimated by Cronbach alpha was 0.613. The part regarding information about the participant’s demographics, educational and professional background was elaborated in the previous chapter of the paper. Here the findings regarding the other parts in the questionnaire are presented. The first part in the questionnaire was designed to seek an answer to the first research question “Are instructors aware of what critical thinking is and involves?. This part included three main items and a few open-ended questions within each item, so it produced both quantitative and qualitative data. The findings taken from the quantitative data here are shown in Table 2. Table 2. Frequencies of Responses Regarding Teachers’ Awareness of What Critical Thinking is and Involves Statement Yes No Unsure 1. I have a clear understanding of what critical thinking actually involves.
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