Our new Success International English Skills for Cambridge IGCSE™ English series is publishing soon. In this blog, one of our talented authors, Ingrid Wisniewska, discusses ways you can encourage your students to develop the important skills of critical thinking and reflective reading.
One way to integrate critical thinking skills into your lessons is to analyse a topic from different perspectives. By imagining different viewpoints students learn to evaluate their own assumptions and compare them with others.
Understanding different perspectives helps students to synthesise ideas from different sources and use them to solve problems. Finally, visualising different perspectives allows students to develop empathy, a skill which can help them be more tolerant and respectful of others’ opinions.
Here are some practical tips for integrating different points of view in your reading lessons.
Think about the reader’s viewpoint
Coursebook reading passages are often followed by comprehension questions. These focus on understanding the writer’s viewpoint by identifying bias and the writer’s assumptions. But what about the reader’s viewpoint? An article about tourism in Italy could be read quite differently by a tour company operator, a hotel developer, a tour guide and a local resident. An article about using animals for research would be read differently by an animal rights activist, a hospital doctor, a pharmaceutical company director or by a medical researcher.
Read from another person’s viewpoint
One way to practise imagining these different viewpoints is to assign different roles and ask students to read the text from the point of view of their role. Ask them which ideas the person in that role would agree or disagree with and note all the ideas that would support their point of view. Afterwards, students can use their notes to role play a discussion of the topic in pairs or groups.
Tell the story from a different viewpoint
Ask students to re-tell the story from the perspective of a different character in a story. For example, in the new edition of Success International, Unit 8, Naila describes how she went to the beach for the day with her family and saved a little boy from drowning.
Students can re-tell this story from the point of the view of the boy’s mother and of the little boy. Students can also role-play an interview with each character, imagining their thoughts and feelings.
Develop autonomy
As students get used to this kind of task, encourage them to come up with different possible perspectives on a text. They can then select which perspective they feel would be most helpful in deepening their understanding of the topic. This will develop students’ autonomy in applying multiple perspectives to their own independent reading.
Reflect and self-evaluate
An important part of critical thinking is being able to reflect on one’s thinking processes. Ask students to evaluate their own viewpoint and describe how it has changed after looking at the topic from different angles. It may help to generate more ideas if students do a written reflection first. They might complete sentences such as:
Looking at …. from a ….’s viewpoint helped me to understand…..
Reading the text from the perspective of a ……. made me realise that….
Re-telling the story from …’s point of view made me think differently about…..
Then ask students to compare their answers in pairs or groups. You could also set this as a journaling task for homework.
In conclusion, looking at texts from multiple perspectives is a process that can help us and our students develop a more critical approach to reading as well as adding extra opportunities for creativity, communication and reflection.
Ingrid Wisniewska is an ELT author and has written numerous books for students and teachers, including Learning One-to-One (Cambridge University Press), which is a handbook for giving individual language lessons. She is also an author of our new Success International English Skills for Cambridge IGCSE™ resources.
To read more English blogs on topics such as grammar, developing sentences and much more, visit our English blog hub.
