In the last of his posts on thinking skills in the young learners’ classroom, Herbert Puchta considers how language teaching and teaching thinking can usefully be combined.
Based on Feuerstein’s Instrumental Enrichment Programme and the work done by Blagg and his associates, my colleague Marion Williams and I have developed a model of thinking skills work that takes into account the specific needs of the foreign and second language class. Our approach incorporates two significant advantages. First, activities that are meaningful and at the same time intellectually challenging are more likely to achieve a higher level of cognitive engagement from learners than those ELT activities that can be somewhat over-simple from a cognitive point of view. Secondly, the tasks we have developed have a real-world purpose; examples include problem solving, decision making, thinking about the consequences of one’s own or other people’s actions, and so on.
As happens every day in our personal and professional lives, each of these real-world purposes requires a combination of thinking skills. When there is a problem we need to solve, we first of all need to assess what the actual problem is. We need to use our senses in order to get an accurate idea of what the problem is before we can start thinking of possible solutions. Once we know what the problem encompasses, we then need to envisage clearly the objectives we want to achieve, and how we can get there. In order to do that, we need to think of the consequences of possible scenarios or actions, and when we get stuck we need to think creatively (and often ‘out of the box’). Finally, we need to be able to evaluate our actions.
Activity types to develop thinking skills and language
We have developed 13 categories of activity that help with both the development of the learners’ thinking skills and their language. They roughly follow a cline from basic to higher-order thinking skills:
- Making comparisons
- Categorising
- Sequencing
- Focusing attention
- Memorising
- Exploring space
- Exploring time
- Exploring numbers
- Making associations
- Analysing cause and effect
- Making decisions
- Solving problems
- Creative thinking
An example activity
Let’s look at an example from the category ‘Making decisions’ that demonstrates how closely thinking and language work are dovetailed in our approach.
In the activity Who’s got an idea? learners get a worksheet showing eight situations. The learners are asked to look at the pictures and think about what the problem in each picture is and what the people in the various situations should do. Here’s an extract from one of the classes that piloted our materials:
T: What about picture one? What’s the problem?
S1: Vase. The boy playing in the house and vase break.
T: Uhuh. The boy was playing and he broke the vase.(writes it on the board)
S2: The mother angry.
T: OK, you think the problem is that the boy’s mum’s angry. (writes it down) Where’s the mother?
S2: She come in a minute.
T: OK. Any other idea?
S3: Yes, the cat break the vase.
T: I see. So the boy found the broken vase on the floor. The cat broke it.
S4: Yes, the problem is that the mother say the boy broke it.
T: You think the boy’s mum doesn’t believe it was the cat that broke the vase. I see.
We can see that the learners are fully engaged in thinking about what the problem is. The teacher facilitates the learners’ language by helping them to express what they want to say, and by clarifying meaning rather than reacting to the way they say it. This is an important step and prepares the class for the next phase, when learners will make suggestions about what the boy in this situation should do. Learners then think about which of the suggestions made is the best one and give their reasons.
It is easy to see how this approach helps with both the child’s cognitive and linguistic development and at the same time gives the teacher plenty of opportunity to take the learners seriously. This in turn sends out very important messages to the learners, enabling them to develop feelings of competence and serious involvement in their work.
The classroom discourse that arises from this work creates the need for ‘scaffolding’. The teacher listens and as the language emerges, supports the speaker in a positive way, as well as helping the other learners to understand what the speaker is saying.
Read the other posts in this series:
Developing young learners’ thinking skills #1 – developing and applying thinking skills
Developing young learners’ thinking skills #2 – Thinking skills: Model 1
Developing young learners’ thinking skills #3 – Story thinking
Developing young learners’ thinking skills #4 – Multiple intelligences
References
Blagg, N. (2000) Can We Teach Intelligence? A comprehensive evaluation of Feuerstein’s Instrumental Enrichment Programme Lawrence Erlbaum Associates: Hillsdale, New Jersey
Egan, K. (1997) The Educated Mind: How Cognitive Tools Shape Our Understanding. Chicago: University of Chicago Press
Feuerstein, R and Jensen, M. (1980) ‘Instrumental Enrichment: Theoretical Basis, Goals, and Instruments’ in The Educational Forum, 44 (4).
Gardner, Howard. (1983) Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences. New York: Basic Books
Puchta, H. and Williams, M. (2011) Teaching Young Learners to Think. Innsbruck and Cambridge: Helbling Languages and Cambridge University Press