Hello, Mrs.

Hochstein I believe there is a moral responsibility from language teachers in general, to analyze and comprehend the function of language as power over people or problems in education, especially in our context. As I see it, reflecting thinking is not a mere cognitive strategy to think or an activity to expel your brain skills acquiring linguistic knowledge or common knowledge. To teach reflecting or critical thinking means to ask and answer questions to the issue you are judging or evaluating in a dialogical sense, where you will search for the foundation of it, but thinking how the problem got to be where it is. As in social and cultural factors which had structured the students or teachers actions and habitus in learning and teaching English as a Foreign Language. Obviously, we cannot plan an activity like this for beginners level to wonder the reasons for any topic being discussed in the classroom. This functions where the students have certain competence and domain of the target language, that is, they need an advanced achievement. In this case, language is the means to knowledge which in the process, it will arise consciousness of some values, in students or teachers, as they become aware of the topic. One strategy, if you may called it, is to locate the students in the case where knowledge has been developed through centuries, as two different paradigms or points of view. This theoretical foundation of critical thinking should be simple and short. Besides, most of the students have taken Introduccin a la investigacin and Desarrollo de la Investigacin at college, which we may take as previous understanding of the two epistemological paradigms and ask about them. To continue the explanation and to locate the students at some place, this step may be done using a mental map from the different or diverse theories or speculations students put into practice to reason, to justify, to decent, to argue, to validate, actions or things they assume like normal or rationally correct, as common sense in their daily life to solve problems. The purpose is to show the students, they already bring some scientific arguments from their experience. It is relevant they become aware of it, so their sensibility to search and to comprehend may go deeper just to solve the problem in a natural perspective. Nonetheless, it would be perfectly correct to develop critical thinking skills at lower level by using Blooms taxonomy of learning, but again students must reflect on what they are accomplishing with the questioning. By the way, it is not very common to argue over our arguments as Venezuelan speaking community, which means we usually pass information to any one we are speaking to. Hope to you at the event. Rosa Ponce de Avila.