With the popularity of the notion that English is used for communication purposes among EFL educators and learners, as well as the increased need for postgraduate EFL students to share their ideas and research globally at international conferences, there is a growing emphasis on the development of EFL students' academic communication skills. In response to the need, the English listening and speaking courses for postgraduate students in many Chinese universities have been through reforms that aimed at transitioning the goals from the learning of daily conversational English to English for academic purposes (EAP).
While EFL students encounter great challenges when developing their English language abilities for public speaking, the deficiency in critical thinking (CT) abilities has led to many obstacles to achieving effective academic communication (Chen, 2021). Therefore, developing students' CT abilities is often included as one of the key objectives in English academic communication (EAC) courses.
Although extensive research has been carried out on the integration of CT and EFL education, much of the research up to now has tended to focus on CT and reading or writing skills (e.g., Dong, 2017; Zhou et al., 2015). Few studies have particularly explored CT in English public speaking courses (Sun, 2018). And even fewer studies have focused on material development to help facilitate the development of both CT and English public speaking skills in EAC courses.
Many EAC teachers use resources like TED talks as authentic academic speech models. Recently, there is also a growing trend of using TED talks as supplementary learning resources in EAC textbooks. However, their use of TED talks is often limited to presenting speech models, or at most, providing topics for discussions, which is far from enough to facilitate students' development of CT skills and dispositions. The purpose of this presentation is to propose an approach to redesigning the use of TED talks based on Paul and Elder's CT model and Socratic questioning (Paul & Elder, 2001). Worksheets that facilitate students' deep thinking and peer interactions are also provided. The approach provides practical implications not only for the development of EAC course materials but also for CT-oriented English public speaking pedagogy that aims at developing multiple abilities (EAP, CT and public speaking) in one EAC course.
References
Chen, Y. (2021). Language and CT integrated teaching reform on English public speaking course in the context of "new liberal arts". Open Access Library Journal, 8, 1-8.
Dong, Y. (2017). Teaching and assessing CT in second language writing: An infusion approach. Chinese Journal of Applied Linguistics, 40(4), 431-451.
Paul, R., & Elder, L. (2001). CT: Tools for taking charge of your learning and your life. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.
Sun, M. (2018). A comparative study on the assessment of CT skills of English speech learners. Foreign Language World, 187(4), 51-58.
Zhou, J., Jiang, Y., & Yao, Y. (2015). The investigation on CT ability in EFL reading Class. English Language Teaching, 8(1), 83-94.
