Hey Fish, glad to see youre still kicking around. The damage from the Taiwan earthquake had me down to a snails pace on the computer for quite awhile, so I havent been online much. By the way, I appreciated your last post. Thanks for the laugh. I wanted to respond to the post in question, but couldnt get myself past the point of asking, where? where? But anyway, maybe you or anyone else out there can help me with something.

Lately, Ive had some thoughts bouncing around in my head regarding the role of critical thinking in the EFL classroom. Actually, its something Ive thought about from time to time since first coming to China. It seemed easy at first. But let me back up for a moment. Before coming to China, I attended some workshops specifically geared toward teaching in a university environment here. One of those workshops touched on such issues as plagiarism, cheating, the reality of students learning English only to pass the exams, and of course critical thinking. In regards to critical thinking, the workshop raised more questions than it had answers for. Though well intentioned, in retrospect, I have the feeling that the answers werent there and that the topic was, in effect, merely broached so as to make us aware of the existence of a problem that has now, after three years in China, become glaringly obvious to me.

However, it is much easier to notice the problem than it is to do something about it. Classroom discussions text based or otherwise, debates wherein students can choose the topics and can be divided based on their beliefs and attitudes toward the topics, and even holding your breath and hoping that students can make linguistic determinations about language, all seem to be steps in the right direction; however, results seem to indicate otherwise.

Recently, in response to a very common request in a university environment, I have spent a good deal of time on the matter of vocabulary acquisition. Its something Ive done a good deal of research on and in so doing have come to the realization that the research being done by others, far more qualified than myself, is ongoing and that there are no real definitive answers and very well may never be. After all, language teaching itself is a process thats been evolving for a few thousand years and is affected by culture, educational trends, and even methods that have been popularized through successful marketing. Even still, one must try to do their best, and must do so with the realization that communicative competence goes hand in hand with a fairly large declarative vocabulary even though frequency words account for nearly 80% of daily discourse. With that in mind Ive been encouraging students to take a closer look at Latin and Greek word roots, suffixes and prefixes. They love it. Why? Maybe because it fits right into the classical rote learning techniques that theyre so comfortable with, or maybe just because they see it as an additional tool and after all, as a good mechanic will tell you, one can never have too many tools.

Well, I thought I had touched on something great, but guess what; it had little to no effect in terms of creative thinking. On the final exam for this just passed term, I had a section wherein my students could demonstrate what they had learned about vocabulary acquisition. Some correction type questions dealt with basic cognition regarding context awareness chunking, deduction, etc. Pretty good results there. Another sub-section was matching; they were asked to match roots and the like with corresponding meaning geo/earth, hydro/water, multi/many, tele/far, that sort of thing. Again, no problem. Then it got a little tougher. I defined confer, reminded them of tele and inter, both of which we had studied in class, and then asked them to define international teleconference. I think about 75 percent of them got it right or close enough to right that I could give them points for it. But the next question was where it got interesting.

We had had a past, text-book based lesson on housing throughout the world, a sort of problem solving lesson itself. In other words, why this kind of dwelling and not this? All well and good. The question was similar to this: Since we call a two family dwelling, often separated by a garage, a duplex, what do we call a dwelling where many families live? Naturally, I was looking for multiplex as an answer. Out of three classes, totaling more than 70 students, some of them very, very bright by the way, not one student got the correct answer.

Im trying to move my mind past the reasons why critical thinking has gone by the wayside in China I guess the answers are fairly obvious if you think about it. And Im often struck with the paradox of how a nation so filled with wondrous minds that create marvelous technological advancements is, on the other side of the coin, filled with learners who are just plodding along trying to make it past the drudgery of their college lives, as it were, so that they can hurry up and start pulling down the big bucks that their families are so sure theyll soon be earning. But reasons and observations aren't enough.

I know its important to remind myself that learning a foreign language, let alone actually thinking in the language is a daunting task. However, as the above example illustrates, Im not asking for them to create a new rocket propulsion system just asking them to think a little, and they can even use their own language to connect the dots. Yeah, Im not surprised when they dont get my jokes - frustrated sometimes those blank, humorless facial expressions can stifle my comedic side for days; albeit, I am surprised when they cant take that one little synaptic step that would give me so much satisfaction.

Well, just looking for answers. Pardon my long windedness. Any ideas floating around out there?