Publication details
Teaching Lower and Higher Order Thinking Skills Through Graphs
| Authors | |
|---|---|
| Year of publication | 2024 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Description | As our society is becoming more and more technical, visual displays of various quantitative and qualitative data started to prevail over texts in many types of interactions in face to face and online environments. Therefore, the ability to read, describe, and interpret graphs and diagrams of many types is seen as an indispensable part of training university students of all specialisations should receive. It is especially important for STEM students whose focus on factual knowledge and data is self-evident. General and domain-specific understanding of graphs is also necessary for a successful language learning in all areas of higher education. Research has shown that cognitive and linguistic developments are closely connected and language and thinking skills intertwined: therefore, integrating thinking skills in the foreign language classroom raises language proficiency. The aim of the paper is to show how graphs, their description and critical interpretation, may function in an EFL classroom, discuss the aspects of teaching the skill of graph analysis in the English language, and give examples of some activities that function well in the context of language instruction for science students. Even if some critical thinking skills are domain specific, in case of graphs there seems to exist a wide transferability across all STEM disciplines and even beyond them. |