Guess who’s back???

Now this looks like a job for me,

So everybody, just follow me

Cause we need a little, controversy

Cause it feels so empty, wihout me

Almost five months have passed since my last masterpiece was born. And I tried to delay the appearance of next as much as I could, in particular, by not having completed the pre-course task yet, but Mr Montgomery messed up all my cards and here I am, writing again.

     I would like to thank God, thank my family, thank my friends and thank everyone who supported me throughout my whole work – it is what I feel like after finishing another piece of writing at NUGSE, which in turn is the only place where I write. I really hope that after graduating and getting my MA degree from NUGSE, I would never have to write again. In some cases, I just express horror when I realize that “more writing” is waiting for me ahead at the prospect of thesis writing. And I just wander in my mind and wonder is research all about writing??? Is there any possibility to do a research and do not write? These are the main questions I would love to get answers for. Voice your opinion, you are all welcome, guys!

As the research is about reaching the new conclusions, the life itself seems to be a bunch of research. So any human being can benefit from another way of thinking about research. Obviously, you cannot do an appropriate academic research without research skills that you have to obtain, learn, acquire whatsoever… Just to breathe and be in right mind is all you need to do any research regarding your life. If life is all about black and white, by questioning everything, you are trying to prove lies and support truths, so you are standing in the path of understanding different issues from various perspectives. Research in terms of searching for discovering your calling is to become prepared to react to challenges of the changing world. The questions like who are we? where are we from? and where are we going? are the ones which demand from person higher-order thinking even to ponder about and of course evidence-based arguments to be convinced to. As Eminem states in his song “but no matter how many fish in the sea, it’ll be so empty without me” (2002), everybody in this life searching for something, so everyone carrying out his own research…What is your research?

References:

Bass, J., Bell, K., McLaren, M. & Horn, T. (2002). Without Me [Recorded by Eminem]. On The Eminem Show.

photo credits to http://shadyrecords.com/2013/03/21/despicable-me-2-trailer-featuring-without-me/

Critical Thinking vs Languages

What is more important for Kazakhstani students nowadays: mastering the three languages or developing critical thinking? The more I hear popularizing the former, the more confident I become in the latter. In the era of information availability the skill to differentiate facts from opinions, not accepting things without challenging them and “arriv[ing] at the truth” after careful examining the information (Wood, 2002) is more valuable than learning several languages and “arrive at” being multilingual.

From 1956, when critical thinking started attracting educators’ attention, many scholarly works on what CT is and the role of developing CT in education have emerged. Bloom (1956); Ennis (1987); Kennedy, 1991; Kuhn (1999); Mayer, R. E. (1983); Wood, R. (2002);  Paul, 1993; Nickerson, 1987 are only a short list of those who espouse CT as the school policies’ main focus (as cited in Mansoor  & Samaneh, 2014).  Despite, the model of education as global marketing workforce supplier in some countries underestimates the role of CT in mother tongue. Moreover, instead of developing students’ higher order thinking in L1, it “perpetuates”   the power of an international language “without associating it with learning skills”, so that a foreign language becomes a “stratifier” (Tupas, 2014, p. 119). Tollefson warns, “Those who can afford it go to schools with a high quality of English language teaching and learning; those who cannot afford it also go to English-medium schools (because of the belief that English is the way out of poverty) but end up being taught English deemed undesirable by society” (as cited in Tupas,2014, p. 119). The truth is that the quality of teaching languages is not equally available for everyone, and the necessity for various languages differs from area to area. The individual’s actual need for a language can be satisfied by asking questions oneself and others and gauging possibilities and aspirations, in other words, by being a critical thinker. That is why CT in education should be priority.

Regarding Kazakhstan, if we exemplify our blog experience (both Leadership in Ed. and Multilingual Ed.) as a minute model of Kazakhsatani education, the preliminary calculation of current topics shows that concerns around languages appear in the blog fifth as much as on critical thinking. Counting that a critical thinker can find ways to learn languages (and not only) independently, isn’t critical thinking more significant than a symbolic importance several languages?

Tupas, R, (2014). Inequalities of multilingualism: Challenges to mother tongue-based multilingual education. Language and Education, 29 (2), 112-124.