The role of Critical Thinking in the Development of Students' Academic Writing Skills

Mitchell Welle, Nina Shtok

Summary

Academic writing encompasses more than just adhering to formal structures; it necessitates proficient argumentation. Despite this, prevalent teaching materials and programs primarily emphasise form and structure over content generation. Consequently, many students struggle with furnishing substantive content within these structural frameworks. The process of content development, crucial in academic writing, is inherently governed by principles of critical thinking, with argumentation at its core. This presentation reports on the results of a survey on school and university students' awareness of critical thinking skills and dispositions. It also investigates how honing these critical thinking skills can significantly enhance the quality and depth of academic writing. The approach emphasizes integrating critical thinking into writing instruction, thus encouraging critical writing, whose framework allows for ‘a focused, incisive, informed analysis of a topic, question, problem, issue, situation, response to a reading – virtually anything’ (Nosich 2022: xvi). Critical writing draws together various aspects of critical thinking in two general ways: first, by focusing on argumentation, by drawing a logical connection between one idea to another idea— writing a conclusion that follows from its premises; secondly, by identifying common logical fallacies and avoiding it in the student's own work.

Biodata

Mitchell is an American researcher in Philosophy employed in the New Ethos Laboratory through the AMoRe Project cofinanced by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) and Polish National Science Foundation (NCN) at the Warsaw University of Technology (Politechnika Warszawska) and a lecturer in the faculty of English Philology at Vistula University. For more than a decade his teaching and education background extends to the US, Switzerland, Poland, and Ukraine in teaching Philosophy, Critical Thinking and Englsih to students. Currently his research interest is in Critical Thinking in general, Critical Thinking and Fake News and integrating Critical Thinking in education. Dr. Nina Shtok with a PhD in English philology, is currently a faculty member at Vistula University, Warsaw. With over a decade of experience, she specializes in teaching academic writing to undergraduate students. Presently, her research focuses on integrating critical thinking skills into education, particularly in academic writing, involving secondary, high school, and university students, as well as educators across Poland.

Presentation Details

Type of presentation: Talk
The presentation is for: General audience
The presentation focuses on: Various
The session is: Theoretical introduction / overview of the subject
Category: Global Issues in English Language Teaching
Presentation is commercial: No
Speaking on behalf of a publisher, examination board, or commercial organisation? No

Scheduled for

Date: Friday, 2024-09-20, 13:10 - 13:50
Place: NE 230