Project Title

Enhancing JC students’ critical thinking and writing skills through argumentation, enacted role play in immersive affinity spaces, and reflection



Overview

Regardless of which subject a student takes, the skills of argumentative writing and critical thinking are required. Research by Ho (1995) and Ng (1999) on writing pedagogy in the General Paper has found that students pay insufficient attention to the internal structuring of arguments and to the analysis of strengths and weaknesses of arguments.  The research is in the process to address these limitations by seeking to enhance JC students’ critical thinking and writing skills through argumentation, enacted role play in immersive affinity spaces, and reflection. The underlying pedagogy to be adopted is based on the central ideas of experiential learning and enactive texts that provide the basis for reflective thinking and critical writing. Students will use a structured argumentation board to enhance their argumentation skills. Use of the argumentation board will be interwoven with enacted role play to support students’ meaning making and critical thinking processes. Students will also use the (digitally) captured role play as a context for classroom reflection related to the quality of arguments and the dialogic construction of identity in the role playing scenarios. Students’ role playing enactions and logged argumentation discourse will also feed back into English Language and Literature Academic Group course that helps prepare NIE in-service teachers to teach the General Paper at the JC level.

 

Project Reference

LSL 7/06 CYS