Abstract
This study reports on how the supplementation of online resources, informed by systemic functional linguistics (SFL), impacted English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) student writers’ development of critical thinking skills. Through qualitative analyses of student-teacher interactions, interviews with students, and students’ written documents, the case study shows that through 1 semester of intensive exposure to SFL-based online resources in a college Chinese EFL writing classroom, EFL writers were able to develop critical thinking skills in regard to the construction of effective academic writing, although it was a process of encountering and overcoming challenges. Through teacher mediation and their own efforts, they could adjust to the online resources-based classroom, exemplified by their utilization of SFL-related categories offered through online resources to analyze and evaluate the interrelationship between language features and the content manifested in valued texts, and regulate the content of their own academic writing.
Highlights
Developing students’ critical thinking skills has been a crucial component of the language teaching curriculum, as it fosters students’ abilities to analyze and evaluate information, as well as to make their own decisions related to their academic success (Nold, 2017)
Compared with the pre-study survey, which showed that students’ knowledge of writing was constrained to structural accuracy as well as their limited experiences with online resources, over the semester, the students constructed their understanding of the value of online resources as learning materials, through which they developed an awareness of the use of language resources in constructing or deconstructing writing content on both the language and meaning levels, not fully fledged, along with a zigzag trajectory
In response to the importance of learning materials and educators’ struggle for accessible tools to develop students’ critical thinking skills in EFL classrooms, this study shows that in a writing classroom that synergized online resources and systemic functional linguistics (SFL), students gained knowledge on how online linguistic resources could be utilized for text analysis, evaluation, and regulation
Summary
Developing students’ critical thinking skills has been a crucial component of the language teaching curriculum, as it fosters students’ abilities to analyze and evaluate information, as well as to make their own decisions related to their academic success (Nold, 2017). Experienced writers have to construct texts at the dual levels of content and language as endorsed by academic English communities (Fang & Schleppegrell, 2010). Even in international communities that try to develop English writers’ critical thinking skills, actual writing teaching practices are still limited to non-linguistic strategies (e.g., using questions), which are often too abstract or inaccessible for students’ writing literacy development on both the content and language levels (Mok, 2009). There is a lack of effective learning materials and teaching strategies in EFL contexts that can cement critical thinking skills with writing construction and help students harness contextually embedded linguistic choices to compose effective writing (Rose & Martin, 2012).
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