Abstract Summary
This presentation proposes eight principles (TERRIFIC) for language and critical thinking integrated instruction: targeting, evaluating, routinizing, reflecting, inquiring, fulfilling, integrating, and content. Implementing these principles will bring about teaching innovation and quality improvement in ELT, contributing to the whole-person education of English programs in universities.
Abstract :
In EFL (English as a Foreign Language) countries, conventional English language teaching (ELT) focuses on language knowledge, skills and communicative competence. The interdependence between linguistic competence and critical thinking has been ignored to a large extent. As critical thinking is at the heart of tertiary education, developing linguistic competence and critical thinking simultaneously in ELT becomes vital for EFL students at the university level. In Chinese higher education, one of the top priority issues in the educational reform of the English departments and college English teaching at large is how to develop critical thinking in language teaching, or how to develop linguistic competence and critical thinking at the same time. This presentation proposes eight teaching principles including targeting, evaluating, routinizing, reflecting, inquiring, fulfilling, integrating, and content (TERRIFIC) in order to provide strategies and guidelines for the teaching design of language and critical thinking integrated instruction. It is hoped that implementing these principles will bring about English language teaching innovation and quality improvement, and make contributions to the cultivation of foreign language talents of high caliber and interdisciplinary knowledge structure. This study will also shed light on our understanding of the content and pedagogy of ELT in the context of higher education.
