Development of critical thinking skills of students of non-linguistic specialties

Abstract

Critical thinking skills are as mandatory for a modern young competitive specialist, a graduate of a non-linguistic university, as the ability to conduct professional activities in a foreign language and computer literacy. The lack of critical thinking skills development methods determines the relevance of the research related to the development of methodological support of the critical thinking skills development in the framework of professionally oriented foreign-language education/ESP teaching in non-linguistic universities. Critical thinking is a special kind of cognitive activity that is closely related to the use of practical reasoning and intelligence. This is the possession of a system of assumptions that is used to analyze phenomena, information and events, and allows you to make grounded assessments and interpretations, to use extrapolation, to draw conclusions, and to correctly apply the obtained results to various situations and solve specific problems. The authors propose to consider critical thinking as a set of skills such as making assumptions, analyzing arguments, drawing inferences, deduction, interpreting information and making hypotheses. We assume that the development of each skill separately should lead to the formation of a complex skill of critical thinking. The formation of the development of the above-mentioned skills can be integrated into the foreign languages teaching in the process of training technical specialists, as part of the formation of foreign language communicative competence. After testing, which revealed the level of formation of various skills that make up the complex skill of critical thinking, the authors developed a set of exercises aimed at the formation and development of critical thinking skills. The approbation showed students interest in new types of exercises in foreign language classes. The results of this work can be used in the framework of teaching foreign languages (ESP) in non-linguistic universities.

Keywords

• non-linguistic university
• english for specific purposes
• communicative competence
• critical thinking skills
• assumption
• inference
• syllogism
• interpretation of information