One of the most well-known famous types of thinking is critical thinking. Today, one of the most important areas of the teacher's work is the development of students' critical thinking, which is achieved by selecting such methods and techniques of work, in which students awaken research, creative activity to comprehend new material based on existing knowledge. The article discusses the role and methods of development of critical thinking in the modern world. Critical thinking is a system of judgments that is used to analyze things and information, interpret phenomena, evaluate events, and then draw objective conclusions. Such thinking is especially important to develop in the modern world, because in the digital world there is a lot of false information that can mislead a person.
Keywords: critical thinking, technology, thinking, foreign language, students, methodology, teaching.
Modernization of the system of higher professional education in the Republic of Kazakhstan, due to socio-economic and innovation-technological processes in society, is focused on training specialists who are able to realize the accumulated potential, including both knowledge, skills, experience, and personal qualities, to ensure successful activities in a certain area. This required the transition of education from the paradigm of knowledge to the paradigm of competence. The change of paradigms is caused not only by external socio-economic changes in society, but also by a change in the form of perception and awareness of information by our modern students. M. G. Delyagina, noted that «modern information technologies, accelerating technological progress, accelerate and complicate the processes of consciousness, which is forced to adapt to technological acceleration. Thus, they open a new direction for their own development — evolution in mentality [1].
Judging by the latest research in the field of social pedagogy and psychology, scientists have proven that external factors affect the change in the structure of the cerebral cortex, and, accordingly, our students, who are the so-called «modern digital natives», that is, people born and raised in the digital age, indeed, they think differently, unlike their ancestors.
From the statements of M. McLuhan, «the development of electronic means in communication returns human thinking to the pre-text era, and the linear sequence of signs ceases to be the basis of culture» [3]. The linear thought processes that dominate the education system are in dissonance with the cognitive skills of our students, which are characterized by the so-called «clip culture or thinking» developed by computer games and «useless festivities» on the Internet. Clip consciousness, which is relevant for modern students, has both its advantages: increasing the ability to multitask, parallelism, reading visual signs and creating images, and disadvantages: weakening of memory, attention, deterioration in the ability to analyze, caused by a huge amount of diverse and conflicting information that previously noted.
Today, the task of a modern teacher, in our opinion, is to find a clear balance between the use of bright, imaginative and dynamic forms of presenting material that are close and understandable to the modern generation and the need to develop reflection and especially critical thinking. It is worth emphasizing that there are a large number of opinions and assessments related to the essence and concept of critical thinking: if you look at it from one side, then this thinking is associated with negative thinking, as it involves conflict situations, disputes; and on the other hand, it combines the concepts of «analytical thinking», «logical thinking», «creative thinking», etc. This term «critical thinking» has also been known for a very long time, from the works of such famous psychologists as J. Piaget, J. Brunner and L. S. Vygotsky.
The technology for the development of critical thinking has received fairly wide coverage, both in foreign and domestic methodological literature. A retrospective of the development of pedagogical thought shows that L. S. Vygotsky, in his theory of meaningful learning, spoke about the need for critical thinking, but only in the 90s of the XX century, American scientists Kurt Meredith, Charles Temple and Jenny Steele developed the theory of Development of Critical Thinking through reading and writing. Their legitimacy is the way that they not just resolved the substance of decisive reasoning as a bunch of reasoning abilities and capacities that is thinking abilities, yet additionally fostered a specific calculation of activities focused on the development of decisive reasoning. Up to this point, there is no widespread meaning of decisive reasoning. Various creators accept that an individual with decisive reasoning is an individual who isn't dependent upon legitimate assessment, driving an inside speech, thinking freely. According to I. V. Mushtavinskaya, critical thinking is «open thinking that does not accept dogma, developing by imposing new information on personal life experience» [2]. We are also close to the definition given by D. Halpern: «Critical thinking is the use of cognitive techniques or strategies that increase the likelihood of obtaining the desired end result. This definition characterizes thinking as something distinguished by controllability, validity and purposefulness, — this type of thinking, which is used when solving problems " [5] since, in our opinion, it covers the main aspects of critical thinking, such as reflection, analysis, activity, as well as the fact that Critical thinking is a skill that can be developed through a specially organized form of training.
Covering a variety of methods and techniques of problem-based and developmental learning, the technology for the development of critical thinking is most clearly manifested when working with information in the process of reading and writing [4]. The main stages of the educational process based on this technology are challenge, comprehension and reflection. The principle objective of the test stage is to refresh the individual experience and information on understudies on the issue viable, invigorate interest in the theme, and figure out the assignments of concentrating on instructive material. The understanding stage includes the presentation and individual allotment of new data. The phase of reflection is related with the examination and imaginative handling of the obtained information.
In our opinion, the development of writing should be given more attention especially in the age of chats and SMS, since it is the process of writing that contributes to the activation of the internal connections of all analyzer systems: visual, speech-motor, auditory and motor. It has been scientifically proven that a self-formulated sentence is remembered 7 times faster and retained in memory longer than a reproduced one. Writing tasks ought to urge understudies to utilize decisive reasoning systems, make them think, investigate, assess and, in particular, figure out how to assemble a composed text in a legitimate and reliable manner In order to increase students' motivation to complete written assignments that require perseverance and independence of thought, the teacher must be able to «deceive» «digital natives» by posing the question so that looking for the answer in «Google» they will conduct real research. Our experience shows that the more difficult, it would seem, the task, the more creative abilities it requires, the better students perform it.
The effectiveness of mastering foreign language competencies is facilitated by the emotional involvement of students in the educational process, which is accomplished by utilizing melodies, movies and game methods that increment inspiration and diminish exhaustion. The more faculties associated with the impression of data, the more prominent the opportunity to keep it in long haul memory [6].
Also, debates are most conducive to the formation of critical thinking, as they provide for the presence of such skills as: the ability to perceive and understand a point of view that is different from one's own; the ability to defend one's position or change it under the influence of irrefutable arguments; vision of the situation in a global context, taking into account cause-and-effect relationships, which is the essence of critical thinking. The experience of organizing the educational process in English using the algorithm of actions provided by the technology for the development of critical thinking suggests that it helps and contributes to the development of both various foreign language competences and independence and activity of thinking in modern students.
References:
- The practice of globalization: games and a new era / under the rules, ed. M. G. Delyagina. M.: Infra-M, 2000. 342 p.
- Mushtavinskaya I. V. The role of technologies for the development of critical thinking in the cognitive and metabolic abilities of a teacher and a student. // Problems and prospects for the development of education: materials of the II Intern. scientific conf. (Perm, May 2012) — Perm: Mercury, 2012. — P. 19–24 [Electronic resource]. URL: http://tech-lyceum.ru/3/ttt.htm (date of access: 11/10/2014)
- Semenovskikh T. V. The phenomenon of «clip thinking» in the educational university environment [Electronic resource]. URL: http://naukovedenie.ru/PDF/105PVN514.pdf (Date of access: 01/20/2015)
- Technology «Development of critical thinking through reading and writing» [Electronic resource]. URL: http://www.moluch.ru/conf/ped/archive/58/2244/ (date of access: 11/10/2014)
- Halpern D. Psychology of critical thinking. SPb., 2000. 512 p.
- Lakhotyuk L. A., O. V. Mikhailova «Experience in using technologies for the development of critical thinking in English classes at a technical university»Text: direct // Young scientist. — 2015. — No. 9 (89)
