Teachers’ perspectives on critical thinking in the English classroom in Kazakhstani secondary schools

• In Event: Publication mentoring workshop session
  In Special Session: Teachers

Proposal

In 2014, I entered a PhD program at Nazarbayev University Graduate School of Education (NUGSE), Kazakhstan, pursuing to explore how the school teachers of English in Kazakhstan conceptualized critical thinking. I had my viva in July 2018; my dissertation was assessed as “Pass with minor revisions”; after that, I revised and elaborated on the Examining Committee’s comments and submitted the dissertation early October. Currently, I am waiting for my supervisor’s feedback expecting to graduate in 2019.
The four years of the investigation resulted in a monograph that presents rich contextual data and conceptual findings that could be useful for researchers who are interested in such areas as teachers’ beliefs, critical thinking and teaching English as a foreign language. However, having a long read of over 250 pages at hands, I am challenged to disseminate the results of my work, because it is difficult for me as an emerging scholar to extract the information and focus on one particular area to shape the material into a high-quality article. Thus, I would really appreciate the support of critical peers and experienced mentors to foster the skill of writing for publications.
The purpose of my study is to explore how EFL teachers in Kazakhstan conceptualize critical thinking recently integrated as a curriculum component into secondary education by the Ministry of Education and Science of the Republic of Kazakhstan. This initiative is a result of the internationalization of education in Kazakhstan to match the challenges of the modern world. Similar to critical thinking, the English language has become a transferable skill necessary to have in the globalized world (Irsaliyev et al., 2017). As Pishghadam (2011) noted, it is effective to combine teaching English and critical thinking while the English classroom presents an advantageous ground for students to talk on many topics of social, political, and cultural character. In addition, critical thinking provides many tools for a teacher to develop students’ intercultural competence within an English class. Despite this, many scholars suggested that critical thinking had cultural implications (Howe, 2000; Ngoc Du, 2015) and it could be difficult for the post-Soviet societies to adopt it for schooling (Burkhalter & Shegebayev, 2012; Kesküla et al., 2012; Rubene, 2009). Apart from the cultural differences, there are other challenges that educators might face, such as the challenge of misunderstanding what is involved in being critical and teaching critical thinking, the challenge of the conservative educational ideology, the challenge of “the soft liberal position”, the challenge of critical and feminist pedagogy, and the challenge of risk-taking (Portelli, 1994).
Given that, the overarching question of the study is what are the EFL teachers’ beliefs and practices of critical thinking in secondary education in North Kazakhstan.
To guide this research, the following research questions have been addressed:
1. How do EFL teachers define the concept of critical thinking, notably in the educational context?
2. What are EFL teachers’ beliefs about critical thinking? What are beneficial and challenging issues in employing critical thinking in language teaching and learning?
3. How do EFL teachers report applying critical thinking-based teaching in their classroom practice?
The conceptual framework of the study was the most challenging aspect of the work for me, as I struggled to combine multiple perspectives of critical thinking (Ennis, 1996; Facione 1990; Felix, 2016; Howe, 2000; Paul & Elder, 2010) and teachers’ beliefs and practices within English teaching (Alfares, 2014; Burkhalter, 2013). The ideas of teachers’ changing their beliefs, assumptions and practices (Darling-Hammond, 2016; Fives & Buehl, 2015; Guskey 2002; Timperley (2011) contributed to the construction of the major concepts.
To answer the research questions, a mixed methods research was carried out. Thus, 217 school teachers of English from North Kazakhstan region were surveyed, among them, eight individual teachers were interviewed on a face-to-face basis and 16 teachers took part in 3 focus group discussions. Parallel mixed data analysis (Teddlie & Tashakkori, 2009) was applied to processing the collected data using inductive thematic analysis for the qualitative data; quantitative data were analyzed using descriptive and inferential statistics (principal component analysis and multivariate analysis of variance).
As far as some quantitative and qualitative data operated with similar constructs, they were combined in the discussion section to report on the important findings: what teachers with different backgrounds emphasize when defining critical thinking, what benefits and challenges they have while teaching in the EFL classroom and how they see The agenda of critical thinking is implied within current educational reforms in Kazakhstan in terms of reshaping curriculum and changing teaching styles.

Author

• Xeniya Tursunbayeva, Nazarbayev Intellectual Schools