Language And Critical Thinking: An Analysis Of Japanese Students’ Written Work

Background of the Research

Discuss About The Journal Linguistics And English Literature.

In contemporary societies, the capability for evaluating the information trustworthiness is considered to be an important skill specifically while considering the propagation of unvetted information via use of mass media and internet. One of the important areas of debate is whether there is any contribution of the ethnic background to the dissimilarities in critical thinking performance. Working memory human resources management will be required for the purpose of thinking critically. However, there are restricted resources available in case of working memory and in case if sufficient amount of those resources are expended for the purpose of utilizing a language in which there is low proficiency, then satisfactory implementation of critical thinking will suffer due to non- availability of adequate resources (Butler, Pentoney & Bong, 2017). In this essay, an article is reviewed that comprise of two related studies. This essay aims to review an article which is also based on contentions regarding whether there is any contribution of the cultural background to the dissimilarities in critical thinking performance.  

The critical analysis of the article firstly provides the background of the research. The study was conducted for the purpose of examining the fact that whether there is evidence for supporting both (i) explanation of language proficiency and/ or (ii) explanation of language structure in the critical thinking of the written work of students. The decision of using critical thinking was grounded on the fact that evaluation statements include expressions of critical evaluation which is significant to the idea of applying critical thinking. The term critical thinking can be defined as the active and skilled interpretation and assessment of communications and observations, argumentation and information (Manalo & Sheppard, 2016).

The review of the article provides that the research problem consisted of the fact that Japanese was considered as the most suitable language to examine as it is most inductive and indirect in comparison to English. Critical evaluation skills are considered to be thinking skills and the language of instruction should not be bounded by acquisition. The important question considered here is whether limitations or constraints in the language used could detrimentally impact the performance evaluation (McPeck, 2016).  

The core research question addressed in the article is how language might affect critical thinking performance.  The term language here refers to language proficiency or language structure. This question is important to be addressed as there were various previous researches that claimed the struggle of non- western students regarding the demands of representing critical thought (Liu, Frankel & Roohr, 2014).

Methodology Adopted in the Research

The methodology adopted in the research is divided into study 1 and study 2. Two hypotheses were tested in study 1. The first hypothesis was related to the fact that the production of evaluation statement by the learners in English and Japanese would vary. The second hypothesis was that the skill/ proficiency of the students in a specific language will be associated with the quantity of evaluative statement produced by them in that particular language. 110 participants were selected from among the students of Japanese University for whom Japanese is L1 and English is L2. The procedure used included the provision of a page of Japanese translation that deals with the management of making valid arguments. A 90 min class session was conducted through which the students were familiarized with the Titanic and Space Shuttle Challenger disasters. Then the analysis was made of the aggregate number of sentences along with the number of evaluative sentences. Such sentences were calculated and recorded in the written work of the students. Then accordingly the measurement of language proficiency was made and the operational criteria were drawn up (Kettler, 2014).

On the other hand, three hypotheses were tested in study 2. First was that lower use of target language was manifested in the first year students as equated to the students of second year from whom data was collected in study 1. Secondly, the differences in the use of evaluative language will be constant across Japanese and English. Thirdly, the proficiency of the students of first year in both languages will not unassociated to the quantity of evaluative language produced by them. The method adopted in this study was the same as that adopted for study 1 (Jackson, 2015).

The major findings of study 1 provided the number of evaluative sentences to be F (1, 108) = 4.81, p = 0.030, p2 = 0.006 and the total number of sentences to written to be F (1, 108) = 11.47, p = 0.001, p2 = 0.020. The results of the research clearly predicted that fewer sentences were produced in Japanese due to the reason of greater proficiency of students in that particular language which, in turn, enabled them to effectively produce difficult sentences (Schechner, 2017). The results of study 2 provided that the number of evaluative statements were F (1, 152) = 27.20, p < 0.001, p2 = 0.130 while the total number of sentences are F (1, 152) = 22.90, p < 0.001, p2 = 0.113. These results indicate that fewer sentences and evaluative statements were written by the first year students in comparison with the second year students. However, more sentences were written by the first year students in English than in Japanese (Halpern, 2014).    

Findings

The findings are significant for the future research as in addition to the language proficiency, the critical evaluation of the performance of people is also influenced by a number of other factors like working memory capacity, general intelligence or communication skills. Such factors are not dependent on the language used for expression. These factors can be easily identified and examined in future researches. Future researches can also be grounded on the fact that how the evaluative languages of the Japanese students can be compared to that of the students whose first language is differently structured (Nosratinia & Zaker, 2015).

In my view, there are certain limitations with this research. The research was not planned to be a complete investigation of language structure hypothesis. The research only made examination regarding whether there are observable differences present in the written work of the students of Japanese university due to the existence of critical thinking qualities dependent upon the language mostly used i.e. English or Japanese (Fairclough, 2014).   

The review of this article further provided that the hypotheses conducted was based on certain assumption. The assumption included the fact that when the instructions regarding the undertaking and conveying of critical evaluation are not received, the language proficiency of the students will not make any changes to their creation of evaluative language. This will be due to the fact that the students will suffer from limited knowledge of the structures that form the basis of producing the required language. The assumption taken by the authors are correct as it is impossible for the students to produce another language without having the required knowledge (Eftekhari, Sotoudehnama & Marandi, 2016).

The article is effective and credible as the research conducted acts as the evidence of the results. It provides that the L2 proficiency of the students turns out to be a limiting factor for the students in the use of critical thinking skills. It further offers suggestions that the use of educational strategies should be made for the purpose of improving the non- native speaker proficiencies of the students in English. When these strategies would be successfully implemented it will result in the reduction of perceived deficiencies of the critical thinking competencies of the foreign students (Forawi, 2016).      

Therefore, it can be concluded through the review of this article that appropriate classroom instructions play an important role in facilitating the development of the abilities of the students for demonstrating the critical thinking competencies in the work produced by them. It was also witnessed that the writing profiles of the second year students were the same as that of the first year students. Furthermore, without the receipt of explicit instructions, the majority of the students cannot be expected to become aware of the manner of effectively demonstrating the critical evaluation in the work produced by them. The lack of correlations between L 1 and L 2 proficiency of first year students along with their usage of the evaluative language underlined the requirement of providing critical evaluation training to students.

References

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Eftekhari, M., Sotoudehnama, E., & Marandi, S. S. (2016). Computer-aided argument mapping in an EFL setting: does technology precede traditional paper and pencil approach in developing critical thinking?. Educational psychology Research and Development, 64(2), 339-357.

Fairclough, N. (2014). Critical language awareness. Routledge.

Forawi, S. A. (2016). Standard-based science education and critical thinking. Thinking Skills and Creativity, 20, 52-62.

Halpern, D. F. (2014). Critical thinking across the curriculum: A brief edition of thought & knowledge. Routledge.

Jackson, S. L. (2015). Research methods and statistics: A critical thinking approach. Cengage Learning.

Kettler, T. (2014). Critical thinking skills among elementary school students: Comparing identified gifted and general education student performance. Gifted Child Quarterly, 58(2), 127-136.

Liu, O. L., Frankel, L., & Roohr, K. C. (2014). Assessing critical thinking in higher education: Current state and directions for next?generation assessment. ETS Research Report Series, 2014(1), 1-23.

Manalo, E., & Sheppard, C. (2016). How might language affect critical thinking performance?. Thinking Skills and Creativity, 21, 41-49.

McPeck, J. E. (2016). Teaching critical thinking: Dialogue and dialectic. Routledge.

Nosratinia, M., & Zaker, A. (2015). Boosting autonomous foreign language learning: Scrutinizing the role of creativity, critical thinking, and vocabulary learning strategies. International Journal of Applied Linguistics and English Literature, 4(4), 86-97.

Schechner, R. (2017). Performance studies: An introduction. Routledge.