Voices without words: doing Critical Literate Talk in English as a Second Language

Abstract

Critical thinking is believed to be an essential skill for 21st Century survival, and therefore, has been widely promoted in education. In Hong Kong, critical thinking is one of nine generic skills to be developed across all subjects including English. How students do critical thinking in English as a second language (ESL) that is seldom used outside school, and yet, holds high social value has, however, been under-researched. The present paper is concerned with how some low-English proficiency senior secondary students in Hong Kong conducted critical talk in English. The study specifically investigates how the students expressed in English ideas that were first developed in Cantonese (the students’ first language). Based on a discourse analysis of the criticality and elaborateness of the Cantonese and English utterances of one group of students, we discuss findings that reveal a significant contrast between the students’ more elaborated discourse in Cantonese and a much restricted discourse in English characterized by reduced content and limited lexico-grammatical structures. The findings call for more attention to the impacts of linguistic proficiencies on critical thinking performance of ESL learners, and to how the communicative gaps in critical literate talk revealed in the ESL learners' first and second languages can be gradually reduced.