Fostering EFL education-oriented Reading and Speaking skills through Critical Thinking for the degrees in Education

English

Event
GKA EDU 2021:     10th International Conference on Education and Learning
06/23/2021

Keywords
productive skills receptive skills reading-into-writing higher education primary education early childhood education

English as a Foreign Language (EFL) teaching has traditionally hinged on the fourth linguistic skills (listening, speaking, reading, and writing) in addition to the cross-sectional nature of grammar. Firstly, the inquiry into the role of reading has given rise to extensive research in both the L1 (e.g. Doolittle et al., 2006) and L2 (e.g. Anderson, 2003; Pressley, 2002). Secondly, reading has been intimately connected with a series of psycholinguistic factors such as sociolinguistic aspects, the understanding of pragmatics, and the use of background knowledge (see Koda, 2004; Westwood, 2003). Closely associated with output skills, the role of reading seems to go in parallel with speaking skills. Previous research has suggested that critical thinking skills favor the acquisition of cognitive operations (Connolly, 2000; Davidson, 1998), a much-needed skill in the academic world (see Pally, 2000). Speaking is central to Communicative Language Teaching (CLT), whose main aim lies in the use of the target language for real-life communication (see Canale, 1983; Nunan, 1991, 2004; Littlewood, 2007). In the context of Higher Education, when it comes down to building on the aforementioned approach, the conflation of both reading and speaking has been put forward by some voices (e.g. de Chanzal, 2014), for instance, by means of the so-called integrated tasks. In the context of Spanish Higher Education, recent empirical endeavors (e.g. Garcés-Manzanera, 2021) have revealed that EFL courses in Education degrees ought to provide more education-specific language affordances. Hence, the aim of this position paper is manifold: (1) to outline the conceptualization of both EFL reading and speaking skills, (2) to combine theoretically reading-into-speaking as integrated tasks with a clearly defined orientation to education degrees, and (3) to link this theoretical initiative of reading-into-speaking tasks with potential new research agendas.