TESOL REFLECTIONS

  Critical thinking is a key attribute of scholarship, and in order for students to be successful in higher education (HE), it is imperative that they understand and use it effectively (Alexander, Argent, & Spencer, 2018). Davies and Barnett concur, but also take a wider view stating that 'critical thinking is a necessary part of the formation of critical citizens’ (2015, p. 1). However, it is a concept or term that is not easily defined, or rather, not easily defined in a comprehensive and universally accepted way (Alexander et al., 2018; Hitchcock, 2019). Naturally, there have been numerous attempts over the years to define it as definitively as possible. In fact, Davies and Barnett remind us that in 1990 the American Philosophical Association brought together ‘an authoritative panel of forty-six noted experts on the subject to produce a definitive account of the concept.’ However, Davies and Barnett are of the opinion that the resulting definition of critical thinking produc...

  The CARS model In his seminal work on genre analysis published in 1990, John Swales introduced the revised version of his Create a Research Space (CARS) model. Adika (2014, p. 58) explains that this model  'describes the rhetorical moves that researchers utilize to claim research space in their disciplines in a highly competitive environment.' Specifically, the CARS model pertains to the introduction section of research articles (RA). Swales (1990) points out that introductions can be difficult to write. This is because RA authors have an array of options at their disposal for how they might approach the opening paragraphs.  The CARS model comprises 3 rhetorical moves, each with particular steps (See Table 1). Hyland (2006, p. 50) defines a rhetorical move as ‘a distinct communicative act designed to achieve a particular communicative function’. Put another way, a rhetorical move is a stretch of text anywhere from a phrase to a paragraph with a particular job (Rienecker...

  Lev Vygotsky In education, scaffolding as a term and notion was first introduced by Wood, Bruner, and Ross in 1976 (Deng, Chan, & Zhang, 2014). However, it is an approach and practice widely associated with the Russian psychologist, Lev Vygotsky (Gibbons, 2015; Hyland, 2006; Langford, 2005). Vygotsky’s theories about the psychology of learning are primarily concerned with how children learn and develop. He was a social progressivist, and as such, asserted that learning is social. This perspective on learning and development, 'broadly termed sociocultural,'  is a departure from 'earlier Western psychological theories'. In essence, sociocultural theory as it relates to human development, emphasises social interaction over the purely individualistic, taking into account an individual’s 'social, historical, and cultural experiences,' (Gibbons, 2015, p. 13). Pure social progressivism asserts that the child’s development is a self-guiding process. Vygotsky,...

 Introduction The term ideology, coined by the French philosopher Antoine Destutt de Tracy in 1796, could be said, according to Nana (2016, p. 168), to refer to: 'the very habits of mind, beliefs, assumptions, expectations, which govern the life of an individual and a group and which often are superimposed on the world in order to give it structure or meaning'. Given this description, as I see it, ideology might be viewed as a way of projecting the inner workings of the mind, whether consciously or unconsciously, to create external structure/s or realities, as well as the projection itself. In other words, ideology encompasses the thought, the action, and the outcome. Nana (2016) argues that the relationship between language and ideology is one that includes concepts related to the social and linguistic, and accompanying interests of a moral and political nature. One incarnation of language ideology is “the ‘one nation, one language’ model of language and identity that dev...