Abstract
In a democratic society students need to cultivate independent and higher-order thought processes, and school curricula should provide students with activities facilitating this. This mode of teaching, however, is not always present in subjects like English as a Foreign or Second Language, where the focus of the instruction tends to be solely on its linguistic attributes. Thus, the researcher conducted an online historical image response project with an attempt to encourage higher-order thinking into the EFL writing course. The wiki was employed as a platform for the researcher's 18 Taiwanese university students to post responses to images for a group of American university students. The study aims to find out what higher-order thinking, if any, the participating students exhibited throughout the process, what transformation, if any, the student final writings exhibited after the implementation of the project, and what the students self-reported about the impact the project had on their thought processing. Various sources of data were collected and analyzed, including the participating students' postings on the wiki, pre-test and post-test essay writings, open-ended retrospective written surveys, and follow-up interviews with five randomly selected students. The findings indicate the following: The students exhibited higher-order thinking, especially evaluation and analysis, in their writings; their final writings displayed more thorough understandings and judgmental opinions toward the historical events than before; in addition to considering the project beneficial to their English learning, the students found it also fostered independent and critical thinking skills. In this paper the researcher reports the theoretical background that guided the construction of the project, the process of the project implementation, and the results of the project on students’ thought processes. In the end, pedagogical suggestions are made based on the findings.
Published Version
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call