Critical Thinking and Intercultural Competence: Review, Use, and Classification of the 21st Century Skills in Intercultural EFL Education

Metin Esen

doi:10.5430/ijelt.v8n1p23

Abstract

We all live in a globalised world today, and even the smallest interactions taking place in our daily lives can now take place in a global level thanks to the advancements in telecommunication facilities. To keep up with these intercultural interactions, whether virtually or in real life, people now need some abilities for effective communication and cooperation, and 21st Century Skills are a way to address this need. Among these skills, critical thinking – clear and rational thinking, might be a helpful way of approaching issues arising from intercultural communication and guiding learners in developing their intercultural communication and interaction skills. Both of these competences are used in the area of teaching English as a Foreign Language (EFL), in textbooks, materials, and assessment tools. This article review aims at scanning the literature to find traces of different uses of the skill of critical thinking and intercultural competence in the EFL context to tackle issues resulting from intercultural communication or develop language learners’ intercultural competence. The study also intends to classify these uses by analysing similar patterns in the studies investigated. The review explores 14 studies discussing these two competences in the EFL context and determines three distinct approaches by the researchers.

Highlights

The 21st century is a time of fast development and change, especially in the field of business, which has turned into a global company calling for sharing, travelling, and cooperating in an international scale (Dunning, 2000)
This article review aims at scanning the literature to find traces of different uses of the skill of critical thinking and intercultural competence in the English as a Foreign Language (EFL) context to tackle issues resulting from intercultural communication or develop language learners’ intercultural competence
The scanning process ended up with only 14 articles as these were the only ones that satisfied the preconditions of involving Critical Thinking (CT) skill, involving intercultural communicative competence” (ICC) or intercultural communication, having been conducted in an EFL context; at least being related to language learning

Summary

Introduction

The 21st century is a time of fast development and change, especially in the field of business, which has turned into a global company calling for sharing, travelling, and cooperating in an international scale (Dunning, 2000). According to Reynolds, Tavares, and Notari (2017), three of these frameworks point to the foundational conceptions at the core of the 21st century skills, and they represent the perception of these skills by societies in both the western and the eastern hemisphere, by educational and business resorts. As an attempt, Wang, Brisling, Wang, Williams, and Chao (2000) describe it as aspects of the environment that are related to human beings, which is one of the most simplistic ways to narrow down this complicated term This complication seems to result mainly from different meanings adhered to the concept. Under the light of these disagreements and divergences, nowadays culture has still different definitions such as “the collective programming of the mind which distinguishes the members of one group or category of people from another” (Hofstede, 1994, p. 5) or “the set of attitudes, values, beliefs, and behaviours shared by a group of people, but different for each individual, communicated from one generation to the ” (Matsumoto, 1996, p. 16)

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