Critical thinking, language and problem-solving: scaffolding thinking skills through debate

With a growing number of international students attending universities in the West, the development of critical thinking skills for students from non-native English backgrounds has emerged as a top priority concern for many Western institutions. This chapter introduces a debate course taught at a university in Japan to students of intermediate English ability who had had little prior experience with critical thinking tasks. It aimed to teach critical thinking in an explicit and systematic manner, drawing a connection between the taxonomies of thinking skills drawn up by Ennis (1987) and Facione (1990) and step-by-step problem-solving strategies commonly applied in business and technical contexts. In the course of preparing, performing and evaluating a pair of complex debates, the programme took students through a six-stage process, showing them how to clarify the nature of a problem, gather and organise relevant information, evaluate the reliability of that information, analyse the information to draw conclusions, express those conclusions logically and persuasively, and finally appraise their preparation and performance for future improvement.