Fostering critical thinking and critical thinking instruction in language teacher education classrooms: Insights from teacher educators

While language teachers play a crucial role in fostering critical thinking in students as a means of strengthening their capabilities in problem-solving, informed decision-making, and effective communication, integrating critical thinking (CT) into classrooms can be challenging. This challenge is particularly prominent for teachers of English as a foreign-language (EFL), where orientation to exams and traditional teaching methods tend to prevail. Guidance and support from language teacher educators during the pre-service stage is therefore crucial, in order to equip language teachers not only with the solid knowledge and skills required to integrate CT into their pedagogy, but also with the resilience and sensitivity to determine when CT should be introduced to their students. This qualitative case study examines the attempts made by two language teacher educators in a pre-service EFL teacher education program in Hong Kong, focusing on their beliefs and practice in preparing language teachers to be critical thinkers who would be capable of effectively teaching CT in their future language classrooms. Data was collected from classroom observation and semi-structured interviews with the two participants over one academic semester. Qualitative and inductive analysis of the data revealed that both teacher educators held a strong belief in the crucial role of CT in language learning, teaching, and teacher education. Through the CT instructional strategies of triggering, exposing, guiding, and extending, they incorporated CT into their teacher education courses, with the goal of fostering a pedagogy oriented toward CT in their student teachers. The study concludes by providing insights for stakeholders interested in adopting CT-integrated language teacher education in EFL contexts. Copyright © 2024 College of Foreign Languages and Literature, National Chengchi University.