Use of discourse analysis to enhance students' critical thinking skills

CÉSAR ENRIQUE MALOOF AVENDAÑO
DOCENTE DE INGLÉS Y ESPAÑOL COMO LENGUA EXTRANJERA INSTITUTO DE IDIOMAS FUNDACIÓN UNIVERSIDAD DEL NORTE. ESPECIALISTA EN LA ENSEÑANZA DEL INGLÉS. MAGÍSTER EN EDUCACIÓN CON ÉNFASIS EN LA ENSEÑANZA DEL INGLÉS.maloof@uninorte.edu.co

MARITZA HOUSSET FONSECA
DOCENTE DE INGLÉS Y DE COMPETENCIAS COMUNICATIVAS. DEPARTAMENTO DE LENGUAS FUNDACIÓN UNIVERSIDAD DEL NORTE. ESPECIALISTA EN LA ENSEÑANZA DEL INGLÉS. MAGISTRA EN EDUCACIÓN CON ÉNFASIS EN LA ENSEÑANZA DEL INGLÉS.mhousset@uninorte.edu.co

RESUMEN

Este artículo presenta nuestra propuesta de cómo usar el análisis-crítico del discurso para mejorar las habilidades de pensamiento crítico de los estudiantes. Inicialmente esbozamos algunos conceptos relacionados con pensamiento crítico y análisis del discurso y luego proponemos una actividad de lectura donde los estudiantes analizan dos textos que tratan el tema del derramamiento de petróleo, y que está dividida en tres secciones. En la sección inicial sugerimos una actividad de pre-lectura en la cual los estudiantes responden unas preguntas para activar su conocimiento previo. Seguidamente presentamos una actividad de lectura; en ella los estudiantes completan una tabla usando un sistema para el análisis del discurso conocida como "appraisal" (evaluación o valoración) el cual está dividido a su vez en afecto, juicio, y apreciación, los cuales pueden ser positivos o negativos; estos muestran como el autor se siente respecto a las personas o cosas. Finalmente sugerimos una actividad de post-lectura en la cual los estudiantes sacan sus conclusiones basados en el análisis del sistema de valoración ("appraisal"). El objetivo de las actividades propuestas es hacer que los estudiantes tomen conciencia de la forma como los autores usan el lenguaje para manipular los medios con el fin de expresar su punto de vista.

palabras clave: Pensamiento crítico, análisis del discurso crítico, afecto, aprendizaje, juicio, apreciación, empoderamiento

ABSTRACT

This paper presents our proposal on how to use critical discourse analysis to improve students' critical thinking skills. Initially we briefly outline some concepts of critical thinking and critical discourse analysis, and then we propose a reading activity in which students analyze two different and contrasting texts that deal with oil spill issues. The activity is divided into three sections. In the initial section we suggest a pre-reading activity, in which students answer some questions to activate background knowledge. Secondly, we present a reading activity; in this reading activity students complete a table using a system for analyzing discourse, which is known as "appraisal". In turn "appraisal" is divided into affect, judgment, and appreciation, and each one can be either positive or negative; they show how the author feels about people and things. Finally, we suggest a post-reading activity in which students draw some conclusions based on their "appraisal" analysis. The objective of the activities proposed here are to make students aware of the way authors use language to manipulate media in order to express their point of view.

key words: Critical thinking, critical discourse analysis, appraisal, affect, judgment, appreciation, empower and dis-empower.

New trends in education nowadays are focusing on developing critical thinking skills. Fisher (2001, p.1) asserts that "in recent years critical thinking has become something of a buzz word in educational circles. For many reasons, educators have become very interested in teaching thinking skills of various kinds in contrast with teaching information and content." However, a common complaint among educators, and people involved in the educational field is that students show a lack of critical thinking skills. We believe that, although textbooks and teachers demand that students perform tasks involving critical thinking skills, they are not really equipped with strategies that would enable them to become more critical thinkers.

The main purpose of this paper is to propose the use of critical discourse analysis to enhance students' critical thinking skills. Initially we will be briefly defining the concept of critical thinking according to different authors, and identifying its elements; secondly, we will highlight some elements of Critical Discourse Analysis, which in our opinion could help students realize how language is used to convey ideologies and achieve certain purposes. Our hope is that with these elements, students become more aware of authors' hidden intentions and do not accept as a general truth everything they read in the newspaper or watch on the media. After reviewing some key concepts related to critical thinking and critical discourse analysis, we propose an activity in which students analyze two texts with contrasting points of view about the effects of oil spill to the environment. The purpose of this activity is to help students notice how the authors use language to convey their ideologies and convince readers about their point of view.

Let us start by considering this initial definition of critical thinking: "Critical thinking is the art of thinking about thinking while thinking in order to make thinking better. It involves three interwoven phases: It analyzes thinking; it evaluates thinking; it improves thinking", (Paul & Elder, 2006, p. xiii). This definition initially suggests that critical thinking is a complex process that requires the person's introspection and willingness to reflect about the process of thinking and take this process to the highest level. Secondly, this definition proposes that the improvement of critical thinking skills is at least a three-folded one. First of all, one must question oneself about one's thinking; secondly, we need to examine and assess how critical we are, or up to what extent we have reached higher order thinking skill; finally we need to make decisions and take steps to reach higher levels of criticism.

The Critical Thinking Community defines critical thinking, from now on CT, as "the intellectually disciplined process of actively and skillfully conceptualizing, applying, analyzing, synthesizing, and/ or evaluating information gathered from, or generated by, observation, experience, reflection, reasoning, or communication, as a guide to belief and action." (Paul & Scriven in The Critical Thinking Community, 2007). The previous concept summarizes the elements that comprise CT. Critical Thinking has as starting point our own experiences of the world and how we perceive it.

Let us examine now the following definition of CT, by John Dewey, who is considered the father of modern critical thinking tradition:

Active, persistent, and careful consideration of a belief or supposed form of knowledge in the light of the grounds which support it and the further conclusions to which it tends. (Dewey, 1909: 9, in Fisher 2001: 2).

In recent years there has been a shift in the way education is conceived. In contrast to traditional education, in which students were expected to store a great amount of meaningless information and facts, educators nowadays have been trying to enhance students' critical thinking skills. Memorizing facts is not regarded as important as unpacking them and find the hidden intentions embedded into texts. The definition above suggests what we usually expect our students to do when facing different types of texts. Educators expect their students not to take all ideas presented for granted; instead they are expected to develop higher order thinking skills which would enable them to carefully consider the supposed form of knowledge they are presented with and evaluate it accordingly. Later in this article, we present one of the many plausible ways for students to develop these higher order critical thinking skills.

Educators should have a clear picture of what those critical thinking skills are. Edward Glaser elaborated a more or less comprehensive list of abilities which comprise CT. We reproduce this list below:

(a) To recognize problems, (b) to find workable means for meeting those problems, (c) to gather and marshal pertinent information, (d) to recognize unstated assumptions and values, (e) to comprehend and use language with accuracy, clarity and discrimination, (f) to interpret data, (g) to appraise evidence and evaluate statements, (h) to recognize the existence of logical relationships between propositions, (i) to draw warranted conclusions and generalizations, (j) to put to test the generalizations and conclusions at which one arrives, (k) to reconstruct one's patterns of belief on the basis of wider experience; and (l) to render accurate judgments about specific things and qualities in everyday life. (Glaser, 1941: 6, in Fisher 2001: 7).

In the light of this critical thinking trend in education, it is essential for educators to show and teach students resources, models, strategies and techniques that would enable them to acquire and further develop the critical thinking skills stated above. We believe that critical discourse analysis would provide students with some of these useful models, resources, and strategies to help them become more critical, appraise statements, and discover how language is used to disempower or to empower.

Critical discourse analysis is concerned with what we do with language and how we do it. Halliday's Functional Grammar carries out this kind of analysis. Thompson (1996: 8) explains that:

Functional Grammar sets out to investigate what the range of relevant choices are, both in the kinds of meanings that we might want to express (or functions that we might want to perform) and in the kinds of wordings that we can use to express these meanings; and to match these two sets of choices.

Thompson adds later that "what we aim to uncover through a functional analysis are the reasons why the speaker produces a particular wording rather than any other in a particular context." The way the speaker/writer words a piece of discourse and the register that he or she chooses clearly has an intention. When we speak or write we evaluate events, people and things and we also express our attitude towards them. The main purpose of critical discourse analysis is to unveil how the author of a text uses language to convey certain ideology and persuade his or her audience. In this respect Celce-Murcia and Olshtain (2000: 10) assert that:

The primary interest of critical discourse analysis is to deconstruct and expose social inequality as expressed, constituted, and legitimized through language use - notably in the public media such as newspapers, radio, television, films, cartoons, and the like, but also in settings such as classrooms, courtrooms, news interviews, doctor-patient interactions, as well as in everyday talk. Critical discourse analysts believes that discourse tends to become normative with repeated use and thus appears to be neutral: however, in actual fact, discourse is never neutral. It must thus be analyzed in terms of the political ideology, social history, and power structures that it embodies and expresses, explicitly or indirectly.

In order to be able to deconstruct discourse and reveal the most hidden intentions embedded into it, it is necessary to know the systems used to negotiate meaning. In the reading activity that we will propose here, students will be exploring ways to unveil the appraisal embedded into two texts assigned. Maloof (2007: 6) summarizes the concept of appraisal as a system comprised of grammatical resources and evaluative lexis that we use to express how we feel towards people and things.

In what follows we will describe a reading activity that has been designed to help students foster their critical thinking skills through critical discourse analysis. This activity is intended for Level Four students of English in the International Business School of Universidad del Norte in Barranquilla, Colombia. Level four was designed in order to enhance critical thinking skills in students; in fact the name of the subject is "Critical Thinking". The students for whom this activity has been designed are expected to have an intermediate or upper intermediate level in English.

DESCRIPTION OF THE ACTIVITY

Pre-reading activity

Before giving students the texts, they are asked to work with a partner and answer the following questions:

1. Does oil spill cause permanent damage to the environment? If so, which are those consequences?

2. What could be done to solve this problem?

The objective of this step is to initially activate their background knowledge and secondly to gather students' opinions and ideas regarding this matter. After students finish discussing these questions, the teacher elicits their opinion, and as s/he does so, s/he organizes the ideas on the board. This step of the activity also contributes to develop two of CT abilities identified by Glaser (op. cit.): To recognize problems, and to find workable means for meeting those problems.

Reading activity

The class is divided into two groups. One group is assigned the text entitled "The truth about oil damage", and the other group is assigned "Oil spill: Consequences for wild life". After students have read the assigned text, they are asked to report the author's point of view about oil damage.

The next step in this task aims at having students examine how language systems are used to convey ideology. As we said before appraisal is one of the systems used to express how the author feels about people or things. In turn appraisal is divided into affect, judgment and appreciation.

Martin and Rose (2003: 24-25) refer to affect as the "resources for expressing feelings." Martin (2000), in Hunston and Thompson (2000: 148), defines affect as "a semantic resource for construing emotions." These authors seem to agree that these feelings and emotions can be positive or negative, and they can be expressed either directly or indirectly.

According to Martin and Rose (2003: 24), judgment is "a resource for judging character." Judgment has mostly a moral connotation and it refers to what we think about people's behavior, performance and attitude. Martin and Rose (2003: 28) classify judgment in personal judgments of admiration or criticism and moral judgments of praise or condemnation.

Martin and Rose (2003: 24) define appreciation as "the resources for valuing the worth of things." In other words, appreciation refers to how we feel about things, that is to say, our attitude and reaction towards tangible and non-tangible things such as art and abstract concepts. Appreciation also involves our attitude towards natural phenomena. Like affect and judgment, our appreciation about things can be positive or negative.

Students have to read the texts again, identify how the writers use language to express affect, judgment and appreciation, and finally they complete the table below.

Post-reading activity

Once the students have identified the authors' points of view, and how language is used to convey their ideology, students are asked to draw some conclusions about oil spill damage to the environment and express their own point of view.

CONCLUSION

Texts from different sources and media empower some and disempower others. This might not be exceptionally clear for the readers, listeners or viewers unless they have developed certain level of critical thinking. This empowerment and disempowerment are achieved by using language in certain way. Students can develop the critical thinking skills they need to unveil the hidden intentions of a text through numerous ways.

Our belief is that by teaching students some techniques to conduct this kind of analysis they could become more critical of what they read, listen and watch. In this paper, we suggest that Critical Discourse Analysis could provide students with some useful tools, which would help them identify when texts have their bias. An example that we propose in this paper is the analysis of appraisal in texts, which in our opinion is an excellent tool when we want to reveal the intention hidden behind language. It enables us to detect when the use of certain language resources is attempting to manipulate our thoughts, empower some and disempower others.

To sum up, we expect students to become better and critical citizens by helping them achieve a clearer understanding of how people use language to achieve certain purposes and the effects that the way language is used might cause.

REFERENCES

BBC NEWS. Retrieved, December 10, 2007 from: http://news.bbc.co.Uk/1/hi/sci/tech/2491965.stm.

BLOYER, G. (2003). Retrieved, December 10, (2007). from: http://www.renewamerica.us/columns/bloyer/030331.

CELCE-MURCIA, M. & OLSHTAIN, E. (2000) Discourse and context in language teaching: a guide for language teachers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

FISHER, A. (2001). Critical Thinking. An Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

HUNSTON, S & THOMSON, G. (eds.) (2001). Evaluation in text: Authorial stance and the production of discourse. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

MALOOF, C. (2007). Critical Discourse Analysis: Appraisal. UnpUblished paper.

MARTIN, J.R. & ROSE, D. (2003). Working with discourse. Meaning beyond the clause. New York: Continuum.

The Critical Thinking Community. (2007). Retrieved, November 28, 2007 from: http://www.criticalthinking.org/page.cfm?CategoryID=51.

PAUL, R. & ELDER L. (2006). Critical thinking. New Jersey: Pearson Prentice Hall.

THOMSON, G. (1996). Introducing functional grammar. London: Arnold.

Apendeces

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