Critical thinking and vocabulary

Hello everyone i hope you are doing great.
This week topic is about critical thinking and vocabulary.
Do you know the term "coach potatoe"? A lazy person. How many of them do you know? Perhaps, you probably are one of them, but just leaving this term, suddenly makes you think about it. That's the power of vocabulary, it enables thinking.
Young people need to know how to think not what to think. We all have heard about critical thinking but what is it and how we should use it in teaching vocabulary?
Critical thinking has become an essential skill in today's world, it's something that us as future teachers must learn to embrace in our classrooms because the world really needs it. Critcal thinking teaches how to prioritise time and resources allowing you to analyse what is needed, to be able to read between the lines, to ask the right questions,to think logically etc. Students should be able to ask questions and to analyse the answers and stimulate them to ask further questions, to establish connections in various topics in a way students can discover facts themselves and  increase creativity.
Critical thinking skills include observation, interpretation, analysis, inference ,evaluation, explanation.  If we manage to teach our students how to think, how to approach the new data creatively and how to apply their knowledge in the future we may produce some very productive members of society. We all want our students to build a strong vocabulary,  because it is important to their performance,  to become better readers and writers.  When teachers engage students through creative instructions methods where the risk of embarrassment is low students are able to succeed and feel a sense of unity in learning vocabulary together. So teaching critical thinking to our students matters more than ever. From solving problems and exploring inquiry-based activities in class to facing the challenges of everyday life we all need critical thinking skills. It's one of the most worthwhile things we can pursue in our classrooms.
A word has many meanings vocabulary should not be rote memorization,  it should be inquiry.  We as future teachers should not provide students with a definition and tell them, they have to know the term for the test, instead we should encourage them to explore the term, and get students think critically about it. Words are doors, by teaching vocabulary as inquiry you can help students open the doors to critical thinking and learning. Critical thinkers are better learners because they explore meaning much more deeply. Thinking critically and seeing things from different angles, students become more open-minded and empathetic, better communicators, collaborative, share ideas etc.
Activities i would suggest to learn better vocabulary and using critical thinking 
1. Ask open-ended question and challenge your students to think on a deeper level.
2. Provide scaffolds when learning something new all people need support,  and we can give examples, hints or clues when students become more adept at that task remove clues and encourage them to do it themselves. 
3. Make predictions you can ask them to take a guess at what comes next , they not only have to think critically but also they will use they will use the language skills they are learning.
And another page i would recomend would be Simon Says: an excellent game for young learners, it's good for listening skills, comprehension vocabulary,  warming up etc.
Getting your students think more gets them saying more and saying more is using language creatively, communicatively .  Words are power , until you have a word for something, you can't think effectively about it. 


Feel free to share your comments and wish you a great week hope you enjoy it 😊.

Comments

  1. Sidorela29 April 2020 at 12:36

    Hi Ornela , l read your post and let me say that l enjoyed it a lot. I found very interesting the fact you have listed some of the activities. Good job , keep going!

    ReplyDelete

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