Thinking Allowed: Linguistic Landscapes-Based Projects for Higher-Order and Critical Thinking Skills

Abstract

This chapter describes the design and integration of linguistic landscape (LL)-based projects in a secondary English as a foreign language course. Throughout the project, students were encouraged to learn about and become ethnographers while documenting their neighbourhoods’ LL. The project was also designed to promote learners’ critical thinking (CT) and higher order thinking skills (HOTS). In this chapter we identify and discuss which critical and higher order thinking skills students used to construct knowledge from their ethnographic work and final presentation of their findings. We adapt and apply definitions provided by Beyer (1985) for critical thinking skills and Lewis and Smith (1993) for higher order thinking skills to Silbey’s (2021a, b) framework, which is based on Grounded Theory (Charmaz, 2007) to analyse students’ selected output as well as their responses in post-project interviews. Our analysis indicates that the LL project supported students’ development of linguistic and intercultural sensitivity.