Critical Thinking and English as a Global Language

Last week, my friends from the ELT department and I started taking online courses as part of a research study I mentioned earlier (click here to see). We are supposed to write reflections every week after our sessions on our blogs. I also believe it makes the experience more permanent.

1^st Week - 07.11.2020

Critical Thinking and English as a Global Language

Firstly, we defined critical thinking. I had basic prior knowledge about what critical thinking was related to. However, after I did the pre-readings and take the test sent, it became more concrete in my mind. Starting the session, the trainer directed some questions about critical thinking, we discussed the questions as groups of four and everyone had their own duty in the group. Then, we shared what we discussed.

I’ve learned that critical thinking is an important skill for people to organize their thoughts in a systematic way, find reliable sources of information, express themselves better. We defined strong and weak critical thinkers. Weak critical thinkers are mostly subjective of their thoughts, they tend to be judgmental or biased and they are probably indecisive. Unlike them, strong critical thinkers are truth-seekers, inquisitive, and evaluative. They are more open-minded and rely on reason. They express their thoughts in a more organized way. After the discussion, we also mentioned interpretation, evaluation, explanation, and self-regulation. We learned the habits of a critical thinker's mind.

For the 2^nd session, we talked about English as a global language. Before the session, we read the paper by David Crystal on English and global language and watched a video of him referring to the same topic. In consideration of what we’ve read, we discussed what is a global language and why do we need a global language? Also the most important question for me, ‘What makes a global language?’. I concluded clearly that, if speakers of a language are powerful, then it makes that language global. It does not happen suddenly. Moreover, English is not the first global language and will not be the last one. I also learned that it is not easiness in learning or familiarity that makes a language global. It is about the status of its speakers. We mentioned how areas like entertainment, education, economy, popular culture, military, etc. are in the hand of English-speaking countries and how they lead in history.

The most confusing part of the discussion was on ‘which English to teach, should we teach standard English, who owns the language’ part for me. We discussed how should we categorize the speakers of English. I learned that it is not a good idea to teach the British or American English as a standard. We discussed the speakers of English and referred to Kachru’s model.