Fostering Critical Writing through Dialogic Teaching: A Critical Thinking Practice among Teachers and Students

Current trends in education reformed the classrooms as critical sites for promoting learners’ social identity, cognitive development, and critical skills. From this perspective, the classroom turned out to be an arena to raise students' critical consciousness to be the agent of change. In such a context, this paper examined (a) the extent to which implementing the principles of dialogic teaching (DT) can increase critical thinking (CT) mode of students’ writing, (b) the practicality of DT from EFL teachers’ perspective. To this end, a qualitative method was adopted and the data were collected from students’ dialogue journals (DJs) and teachers’ perceptions on a CT questionnaire (CTQ).  Notably, students were invited to write DJs to reflect on the class discussion. To quantify how DJs contribute to students' CT practice, Ada's (1988) four critical literacy (CL) modes in writing was employed. Analysis followed Heigham and Croker’s (2009) guidelines for generating meaning from DJs. An iterative analysis led to the identification of codes from students’ excerpts.  Next, a nationwide study was conducted to distribute CTQ among 200 EFL teachers to navigate their priority over the principles of DT. The results indicated that students' descriptive and personal mode of writing decreased in the last temporal session and it changed to be critical and creative mode. Although teachers were supportive of the principles, they reported implementing DT may not be practiced in reality due to some boundaries. The findings suggest that language policymakers and materials developers should move along with the new critical-oriented, self-directed learning and dialogic notion of teaching.