The Investigation of the Teaching of Critical Thinking in First-Year classes in the Department of English at Mouloud Mammeri University of Tizi-ouzou: A Case Study

Abstract

This dissertation attempts to investigate the teaching of critical thinking in the first-year classes in the Department of English at Mouloud Mammeri University of Tizi-ouzou. To carry out our research, we used Quellmalz’ taxonomy of teaching higher-order-thinking skills. As regards data collection, twenty three(23) questionnaires were administered to the teachers of first-year students and a classroom observation was conducted with twenty one (21) teachers. In order to analyse the data, we opted for a mixed research-method, combining quantitative and qualitative methods. The former helped us to obtain statistical data and the latter served in interpreting the results using critical discourse analysis (CDA). The findings show that although teachers know about critical thinking, most of them do not implement it in their classroom. On the one hand, the main findings of the teachers’ questionnaire indicated that the majority of the teachers, that is, 91.3% affirmed that critical thinking takes place in their teaching sessions whereas the minority which was represented by 8.7% indicated that critical thinking does not occur in their classes. On the other hand, the main results of classroom observation reveal that four (4) teachers “always” implement critical thinking in their classes, four (4) teachers “often”, two (2) others “sometimes”, five (5) teachers “rarely”, and six (6) teachers “never”. At the end, we suggest a set of solutions to remediate the weaknesses. Finally, it is to be mentioned that our results indicate that critical thinking is not given much importance by teachers of first-year students.