Critical thinking in spanish baccalaureate. A study to enhance Spanish learners’ critical thinking through literature and cinema in the English classroom

Abstract

This thesis is a phenomenological survey with first-year Spanish baccalaureate students in the English classroom. It was carried out in the city of Cartagena in the south of Spain. The study presents a sociocultural instructional model designed to raise L2 baccalaureate learners’ awareness of critical thinking competence through rhetoric passages from George Orwell’s 1984, the film The Hunger Games and the documentary The Great Hack. The survey consists of a pilot study and two studies which explore participants’ attitudinal factors based on critical thinking responses. The instructional model allowed the development of a proposal for improvement for the future design of L2 projects that enhance sociocultural competence through literature and cinema as motivational resources. The codification of participants’ transcriptions was used as an innovative analytic method to carry out a rigorous qualitative analysis that allowed the researcher to gauge the dynamic of participants’ feelings and reflective attitudes. The survey’s analytical instruments included a three-dimensions critical thinking model, document analysis, interviews, participant observation and participant satisfaction feedback. The data results demonstrate the positive impact of the use of literature and real and fictional stories on learners. Students raised awareness of the relevance of developing their critical thinking competence and gaining confidence in expressing their voice. The elements analysed in this doctoral thesis will allow designing varied content-based programmes available to the teaching community to foster critical thinking and lead to new motivation techniques. Therefore, the present research not only answers the necessity for the student to fulfil their learning syllabus, but it also entails valuable new materials for developing motivational teaching tasks