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CHAPTER 2 LITERATURE REVIEW
The purpose of this study was to investigate how Literature Circles promote critical thinking in a Taiwanese EFL high school context. This chapter will be divided into three main sections to provide a theoretical and literature background of the present study. The first section explains what critical thinking is and the teaching of it.
The second section introduces Literature Circles (LCs) and the theories supporting LCs. The last section connects LCs and critical thinking followed by a summary of the above areas.
Critical Thinking
Brief History of Studies on Critical Thinking and Its Definition
Critical thinking has been involved in teaching throughout ages. It can be traced back to Socrates, the great philosopher of ancient Greece, who emphasized the significance of critical thinking through asking deep questions (Carroll, 2004). John Dewey (1909), an American philosopher and educator, also introduced the concept of
“reflective thought” as an active thinking process instead of a passive thinking process. Critical thinking and learning to think has been listed as one of the
educational goals (Halpern, 1997; Skilbeck, 1970), and it has also been studied in a wide variety of contexts. Nevertheless, there is a lack of consensus in the definition.
Critical thinking is defined as “the educational cognate of rationality” (Siegel, 1988, p.32) with critical thinkers “appropriately moved by reasons” (p.2). Critical thinking
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is also defined as the “reasonable and reflective thinking that is focused upon deciding what to believe and do” (Norris and Ennis, 1989, p.3), the ability to take charge of one’s own thinking and develop sound criteria for analyzing and assessing it (Elder &
Paul, 1994), an ability to assess claims, beliefs, and arguments (Beyer, 1983, cited in Rafik-Galea & Nair, 2007), a kind of social practice that is culturally determined (Atkinson, 1997), and a process to find answers to difficult questions (Inch, et.al., 2006). The purpose of critical thinking is to achieve understanding, evaluate
viewpoints, and solve problems (Maiorana, 1992). Two most prominent characteristic of critical thinking are found to be skepticism and rationality (Wu, 2000). The
National Council for Teachers of English in the United States defines critical thinking as the process in which the suspended judgment with logical inquiry and problem solving leads to an evaluative decision or action. The above definitions of critical thinking are complex and varied. In terms of L2 learning, Liaw (2007) summarized that “critical thinking involves the use of information, experience, and world knowledge in ways for L2 learners to seek alternatives, make inferences, pose questions, and solve problems” (p.51). Inspired by the above definitions, the operational definition for critical thinking in the present study was taken to be the learning process in which one can raise higher order questions and write responses of complex and higher cognitive levels. The participants’ higher level critical thinking skills will be evaluated with the Hierarchy of Bloom’s Taxonomy (Bloom, 1956), the rationale of which will be discussed in the section of Literature Circles and Critical Thinking.
Teaching Critical Thinking
Higher-order thinking skills are increasingly required for success in the
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knowledge-based and rapidly-changing contemporary scenario. In the ever-changing and complicated world, critical thinking plays the crucial role in preparing students for the skills they need for the future, yet the issue of whether critical thinking should be taught and integrated into educational curriculum has been debated for years (Davidson & Dunham, 1996; Facione, Giancarlo, Facione,
& Gainen, 1995; Long, 2003; Tillman, 1994). The opponents to teaching critical thinking stated that learners having been taught critical thinking still fall into logical fallacies, in which the reasons in their arguments often do not support the conclusion (Hirsch, 1996), that there was insufficient evidence to demonstrate the effectiveness of critical thinking problem, and that teaching critical thinking actually do not help but hinder learning (Polson and Jeffries, 1985; cited in
Woolfolk, 2004). On the other hand, supporters of the teaching of critical thinking advocated that critical thinking is a crucial element in learning reading, writing, speaking and listening (Woolfolk, 2004). It can also develop learners’ intellectual skills (Barak & Doppelt, 1999), promote their intellectual growth, and increase their academic achievement (Browning, et. al., 1996; Kassem, 2005; MacKnight, 2000).
Generally, critical thinking is not strongly encouraged in Asian education. The learners in Asian countries are often deemed as passive recipients; the conventional authoritative instruction may stop learners from engaging in thinking (Browning, et. al., 1996; Kamada, 1996; Long, 2003) and collectivist rather than individual perspectives are valued in the society (Long, 2003; McBride, Xiang, Wittenburg &
Shen, 2002). The reproduction-oriented learning habits tend to stop learners from questioning or evaluating the instructed knowledge (Tung & Chang, 2009).There is also the assumption that the teacher will make decisions on what to teach and how
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to evaluate the learning of the students while learners are free of responsibility for their education (Brown, 1997; Patterson, 1993; Tillman, 1994). It was found in an early study of Coodlad (1983) that teacher talks occupied three quarter of the classroom time and the questions of the teachers often only required the children to recall facts instead of using higher level thinking skills. The predominant teacher talk in class was also mentioned in Tsui’s (2002) study. Tillman (1994) further indicated that many young people seldom think beyond the lower comprehension level of Bloom’s taxonomy. Generally speaking, Asian students were thought to be immature in critically thinking, less expressive and inquisitive. However, Liaw (2007) proposed that EFL learners did not lack the ability to think critically.
Instead, they already developed in L1 a variety of critical thinking skills ready for L2 classroom.
Various approaches had been investigated to promote critical thinking in education. Collaborate critical thinking training was integrated in general courses in primary and secondary education curricula (Chiodo & Tsai, 1997; Yang & Chung, 2009), content-based courses (Liaw, 2007) and reciprocal teaching (Shiau, 2010) in secondary and high school context, and critical thinking pedagogy in higher
education (Fang et al, 2008; Huang & Lee, 2004; Liaw, 2007; Yang, Newby & Bill, 2005, Yeh, 2004,Yang & Chou, 2008).
To explore the various techniques to teaching critical thinking, questioning seems to be an appropriate technique in the previous studies. Teaching critical thinking was regarded as teaching questioning because thinking was thus stimulated (Daniel & Lenski, 2007; Martikean, 1973). Commeyras and Sumner (1998) studied 18 students’ questions during literature discussions. Even though they tried to guide them to ask questions they thought would promote thinking, the
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students kept asking whatever they found interesting, curious, or confusing. The questions might not be based on enough support or information from the reading, or sometimes the students got off the topic, yet these questions were found to be good discussion questions as long as students kept talking about their questions.
Patterson (1993) found that fourth grade students improve their thinking skills and reading abilities by reading children’s books and developing questions based on Bloom’s taxonomy. Attitude toward school and social skills were also improved during students’ interaction. Shiau (2010) conducted a six-week case study to investigate students’ development in higher level thinking via reciprocal teaching.
Student-generated questions were collected, analyzed, and coded according to a revised Bloom’s taxonomy. Even though students were found to ask more lower level questions, their factual questions were more related to the main idea. Analysis and evaluative questions also increased along with a variety in the content of the questions.
Writing could also be a way to engage the students in thinking critically.
Ghajar-Ghahremani and Mirhosseini (2005) investigated the effect of dialogue journal writing in promoting EFL students’ critical thinking and found this method to be an opportunity for students to express their voice. Liaw (2007) incorporated content-based instruction in teaching junior high EFL class in Taiwan, and then measured students’ critical thinking skills with standardized test and by analyzing students writing with Bloom’s taxonomy. The test result was not indicative while the depth of the students writing samples provided insights into students’ use of higher-order thinking skills. Lo (2010) also identified Asian EFL students’ critical thinking abilities from the emerged themes in students’ written reflections to the news in their portfolios. The students were not given training of critical thinking.
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Tung and Chang (2009) incorporated strategies (reading comprehension quiz, learning log, group presentations, essay-question reports) into the course design and found literature reading helped weak thinkers improve critical thinking skills, particularly in analysis. Even though students tended to repeat what was said or write something unrelated to the text in personal reflection, gradual improvement in better thinking patterns and habits were also found with the time and practice of the teaching/learning activities.
With the assistance of EFL teachers and adequate practice in thinking skills while learning English, the problem of the lack of critical thinking instruction either in Asian education in general or in EFL context in particular will be resolved. This indicates the need for the integration of critical thinking in educational curriculum, especially in second language teaching and learning.
Literature Circles What are Literature Circles?
According to Daniels (1994), literature circles (LCs) are small, temporary discussion groups who have chosen to read the same book and they can decide portions of texts each time. While reading, the members are assigned different roles and given role sheets in advance. They are to rotatediscussion roles each session (which may provide everyone with a new perspective each session), and discuss the text according to assigned roles. In this sense, LCs activity is a form of collaborative learning, since one of the key insights of collaborative learning is the need for clear tasks and roles in a group. When finishing, the groups share their reading in some way with the other classmates. They then select a new text or trade books, and then move to a new cycle of reading and discussion (Daniels, 1994).
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Daniels (2002) proposed that literature circles consist of 11 key ingredients: 1) Students choose their own reading materials. 2) Small temporary groups are formed, based on book choice. 3) Different groups read different books. 4) Groups meet on a regular, predictable schedule to discuss their reading. 5) Kids use written or drawn notes to guide both their reading and discussion. 6) Discussion topics come from the students. 7) Group meetings aim to be open, natural conversations about books, so personal connections, digressions, and open-ended questions are welcome. 8) The teacher serves as a facilitator, not a group member or an instructor. 9) Evaluation is by teacher observation and student self-evaluation. 10) A spirit of playfulness and fun pervades the room. 11) When books are finished, readers share with their classmates, and then new groups form around new reading choices (p.18).
These key features defines an authentic and mature literature circle activity, while some variations of the forms of literature circles may apply to the students who are first learning to be engaged in the activity.
How Literature Circles Are Supported by Pedagogical Theories The essential theories supporting LCs are collaborative learning and reader response theory. Unlike the traditional teacher-centered model of the classroom, LCs rely on the collaborative work in groups. The reader response theory also gives the readers the freedom to interpret the text based on their experiences.
Cooperative Learning and Zone of Proximal Development
Vygotsky’s (1978) “zone of proximal development” (ZPD) is the most quoted theory to support the small, social group action consisting of learners with varying abilities. According to Vygotsky (1978), true learning is to move from a social level
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when a learner interacts with more knowledgeable peers who lead the learner through scaffolded information to a level of increased understanding to individual thinking in which the content becomes meaningfully and personally relevant (Leal, 1993;
Daniels, 1994; Lehman & Scharer, 1996; Pitman, 1997). Because learning is a social process of collaborating with others, students need to work together to accomplish shared group goals with essential individual accountability, and are communicating in a social environment in order to learn (Dewey, 1938, Short & Burke, 1991).
Reader Response Theory
As a strong support for literature circles, Rosenblatt’s (1978, 1995)
reader-response theory argues that literary text holds potential for meaning-making and a text will be useless unless a reader goes through it while giving one’s own personal
meaning. Readers construct their own meaning as they engage with a text in uniquely personal ways, and the transactions between the text and readers create a new text (Rosenblatt, 1978). Therefore, the group dynamic from peers of mixed ability levels and diverse cultural and ethnic identities would allow students to create more meanings in literature circles (Hsu, 2004).
Connection between Critical Thinking and Literature Circles Connections between Reading and Thinking
Reading can facilitate the development of critical thinking since “A reader must recognize patterns within text, fit details into these patterns, then relate them to other texts and remembered experiences” (Critical Thinking and Literature-based Reading, 1997, p.1). Reading and thinking are positively associated and strongly interrelated (Brown, 2002; Day, 2003; Patterson, 1993). In literature-based reading activity,
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readers are able to exercise critical thinking skills when managing to understand, explain, and interpret the story as well as the implied meanings, investigate the plot, analyze causal relationships, make inferences, apply what has been learned to other context and real world, synthesize what has been read to something new interpreting, and are able to reason logically, solve problems and make evaluation (Brunt, 2005;
Facione, 2007; Halpern, 1998; Lazere, 1987). Through reading readers can
demonstrate the capacity to think critically and also the exposure to “multiple points of view and thus compelled to think and rethink their own ideas and actions” (Tung &
Chang, 2009, p.292).
Literature Circles and Critical Thinking
Literature Circles are beneficial in helping to improve critical thinking skills (Schlick Noe, 2006; Daniels, 2002). LCs activity also has the attributes suggested by Browne and Freeman (2000) that nurture critical thinking: “frequent evaluative questions, encouragement of active learning, developmental tension, and fascination with the contingency of conclusions” (p.301). Literature circles could help the learners to build deeper comprehension and critical thinking skills through conversation in a collaborative environment (Ketch, 2005; Routman, 2000).
Furthermore, as readers work through the text, they are also making to-self, text-to-text, and text-to-world connections. According to Ketch (2005), the readers could connect the story simultaneously with their life experiences and question their own connections; they are also able to synthesize the story and infer the mining of the event, and make predictions (Ketch, 2005). The above skills of the readers fall under the cognitive domain of Bloom’s taxonomy (Ketch, 2005).
Originally, Bloom’s taxonomy divides educational objectives into three
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domains, the affective, psychomotor, and cognitive (Clark, 2007). The “cognitive”
domain, consisting of six cognitive processes- knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation, according to Clark (2007), is a hierarchical list of thinking skills. The six processes are leveled from 1 to 6 and categorized from simple recall or recognition of facts to more complex and abstract mental level. Level 1-3 are considered lower order thinking while Level 4-6 higher order thinking. Level 1-Knowledge is simple recall of fact, Level 2-Comprehension is the understanding of the text, Level 3-Application is to take what has been learned in one context to another one, Level 4- Analysis is to be able to compare and contrast, to make inferences, and to analyze cause and effects, Level 5-Synthesis is the ability to take multiple information together and create something new, and the last one is Level 6-Evaluation, which is the ability to make judgment and evaluation. Even though the taxonomy does not define critical thinking explicitly, it includes the six levels that constitute critical thinking. Aviles (1999) suggested creating test items using this taxonomy to test students for critical thinking. Patterson (1993) also designed a practicum to promote critical thinking skills for 4th grade students by teaching them to read children’s books and develop questions/answers based on each level of Bloom’s taxonomy. Since Portland Public Schools (2004) suggested Bloom’s Taxonomy of Cognitive Domains to be a framework providing useful guide to increase cognitive demands through language, Liaw (2007) analyzed students’ writing samples using Bloom’s taxonomy to identify their critical thinking skills. Since the six levels of Bloom’s cognitive domains was widely adopted by previous studies to evaluate the complexity of students’ critical thinking skills, these six levels will thus be applied in the current study as the coding scheme to evaluate the development of critical
thinking in Literature Circles.
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Roles in Literature Circles Supported by Comprehension Strategies With the strong connection of reading and thinking (Brown, 2002; Day, 2003;
Patterson, 1993), the roles supported by comprehension strategies were chosen to help the students improve their reading and thinking. The original discussion roles in LCs, as recommended by Daniels (1994), are composed of four parts: a discussion director, who carries the responsibility to create good discussion questions and be the host for group discussions; a literary luminary, who chooses memorable passages from the text to read aloud; a connector, who connects relationships of people, places, and events in the text with readers’ own life, personal concerns, other literary works or other
writings by the same author; and, finally, an illustrator, who visualize the text by sketching, drawing, and other forms of graphics (Daniels, 1994). Daniels also suggests five other optional roles—a researcher (surveying the background
information or any related topic), a summarizer (summarizing the text including the gist, key points, or the essence of the text), a character captain (describing briefly a key character in the reading), a vocabulary enricher (highlighting key or unknown words worth noticing), and a travel tracer (creating a map or diagram for the setting).
To enhance the development of critical thinking skills, this study adopts Daniel’s (2002) roles and the roles guided by comprehension strategies (Chilcoat, 2003). In the present study, four roles would be rotated in the LCs: summarizer—synthesizer in Chilcoat’s (2003) role sheets (searching for key points, writing a summary, and thinking about the big idea the author wants to tell us), connector (looking for connection to self, to text, and to world), inferrer (recording the predictions and conclusions that can be inferred while reading the text), illustrator (drawing anything related to the reading). Finally, everyone in the group will need to play the role of
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questioner (writing down any questions for group discussion) and write response logs.
Empirical Studies of Literature Circles in Taiwan
In Taiwan, Literature Circles (LCs) have been a popular reading activity mostly applied in elementary, junior high, senior high schools, and universities. Lin (2006) conducted a study to explore the effects of LCs on elementary bilingual classroom and found LCs beneficial in improving students’ reading comprehension, positive attitudes toward storybooks, developing reading strategies and behavior, increasing interests and appreciation of literature, and develop imagination and creativity. The students also benefited from role sheets, cooperative learning, and writing reading journals. Chan (2008) also found positive results of literature circle in increasing sixth-grade children’s reading motivation and reading ability in an English class. In junior high schools, Wu (2006) studied LCs and junior high EFL classes LC and Lee (2007) found positive effect of LCs on EFL oral communicative competence in junior high classrooms. In senior high classrooms, Hung (2010) found positive effect of LCs on EFL reading comprehension. LCs were more studied in terms of reading
comprehension and attitude in college, technology universities, and university level EFL classrooms (Chiang & Huang, 2005; Hsu, 2003; Hsu, 2004; Hsu & Liu, 2005;
Hsu & Sai, 2007; Huang, 2008; Lai, 2011; Lang, 2007). Among the studies, few studies focused on the connection between LCs and critical thinking (Lai, 2011; Liao, 2009). Lai’s (2011) study focused on the performance of critical thinking abilities (measured by rise in levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy) between in-class face-to-face and computer-mediated groups. Both groups were found to be positively affected after a
Hsu & Sai, 2007; Huang, 2008; Lai, 2011; Lang, 2007). Among the studies, few studies focused on the connection between LCs and critical thinking (Lai, 2011; Liao, 2009). Lai’s (2011) study focused on the performance of critical thinking abilities (measured by rise in levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy) between in-class face-to-face and computer-mediated groups. Both groups were found to be positively affected after a