The Role of Critical Thinking in Professional Development of Linguists

Abstract

The paper discusses the issues in developing and interaction of critical thinking competencies and personal qualities of learners enrolled in the linguistic programs at Russian universities. We focus on Critical Thinking as the universal competency of a future linguist and classify four groups of such significant qualities as cognitive, motivational, reflective and communicative ones. The authors claim that Critical Thinking is the key professional competency of a student which correlates with their professional qualities. To verify this assumption we present the series of didactic experiments with a group of 70 students and estimate interaction and development of professional qualities in the referent group of students. We have obtained the noteworthy data for the Applied Linguistics domain that demonstrate that the level of Critical Thinking has high and medium correlation with such groups of professional qualities of students as cognitive, motivational, and reflective ones, having at the same time low correlation concerning a communicative group of professional qualities of students.