Critical Thinking Development in Foreign Language Teaching for Non-language-majoring Students

Abstract

This paper deals with the problem of critical thinking development in EFL teaching. Having analyzed the definitions of critical thinking, Bloom's taxonomy of pedagogical aims was chosen as a basis for the development of these skills. According to his chain “knowledge-comprehension-application-analysis-synthesis-evaluation” the block-schemes application while analyzing texts in the process of ESP teaching was selected. The results obtained by the students of the experimental group confirmed the hypothesis that using these block-schemes for working with texts allowed non-language-majoring students to understand the main ideas and to answer the questions more efficiently due to developing such skills as analyzing, synthesizing and evaluating the material.