1. Critical Thinking for Language Learning and Teaching: Methods for the 21st Century

The actuality of the Course paper: Recently, English has become an international language that is taught by many people in the world. By mastering English, people can communicate with other people especially with people from foreign countries easily and it can reduce misunderstanding in communication.
The aim of the course paper: The aim of the investigation is to analyze innovative methods of developing learners’ skills and to define the strengths and weaknesses of teaching skills to elementary students and specially to demonstrate the possibilities of enhancement of the reading skills of students learning English
Practical value of the course paper: It is to teach possibility of using those methods and various activities while teaching pupils. The methods and activities are very of the necessity for teachers in order to work with learners effectively. Another practical value of the course paper is to put the theory into practice.
The structure of the Course paper: Introduction, two Chapters: Theoretical and Practical parts, Conclusion, List of Literature. Theoretical part consists of the content and methods of teaching lexis’s, advantages and disadvantages of using games and exercises. Practical part consists of the Results of research work at school.
This work explores approaches to the teaching of listening and speaking in light of the kinds of issues discussed in the preceding paragraphs. My goal is to examine what applied linguistics research and theory says about the nature of listening skills, and then to explore and introduce some listening methods and activities for classroom teaching.

1. Critical Thinking for Language Learning and Teaching: Methods for the 21st Century
1.1 Social impact of the information age
The information revolution brings along significant social changes. The accessibility of information has dramatically changed from limited to overabundant which poses new challenges for study and work. The question is no longer where and how to receive information but how it should be organized, processed and applied in daily practices. This phenomenon seems to affects a wide range of sectors across disciplines. The job market provides new types of positions. Employees require new types of skills. Companies and business change their structures. Enterprise and cooperation take upon a new character.³ Similarly, a significant transformation reaches the educational sector at all levels as, in reaction to the information and communication boom, a changing character of cooperation overwrites the traditional meanings and functions of the relationship between students and teachers. This raises a need to restructure educational approaches to content, instruction and methodologies. Tertiary education, being the last segment in the educational chain, represents a very important element in preparation for practice. The new generation of students is characteristic by a redefined relationship to information and their processing which requires fundamental structural changes to instructions and methodologies, more suitable to reflect current job market reality.
Seen through the lens of a contemporary, while the current reality may look invaluable, the ascent of information and communication technologies poses basic challenges to the current everyday educational practices. One of these is a question of promoting active thinking and concentration. Teachers and educators newly face a phenomenon of a tendency to the student overuse of the “smart” gadgets during instruction. These devices, on the one hand, allow for a maximum accessibility to documents, internet and social media, however, while supplied with an unlimited access to information, they result in “distracted, impatient, and attention-split students. The teacher, if representing a sole information medium, as typical for the traditional frontal teaching style, becomes at the periphery of the student attention span. The current student working style is ‘multi-tasking’ “(Knihová 2015). As a consequence of this phenomenon, students incline to easy responses and solutions. Instead of formulating own attitudes, they tend to resort to existing frames, but frequently void of critical reflection and, due to information overload, with a low degree of retention. This poses a question if this type of work serves as a useful preparation for further occupational practice, that is, if it raises chances to succeed at job interviews, team meetings, to argue or defend own ideas, present work results, negotiate with partners, or resolve crisis, conflicts and problems at a work-place. It is also questionable if it develops the ability to critical thinking or key language and communication competences that turn to be crucial to succeed in the current, globally interconnected world of cultures, communities, institutions and market. The aim of this text is to redefine the key student competences needed to succeed in study and later occupational practice. Based on this, an alternative approach to tertiary educational concept combining critical thinking and communication skill promoting methods will be suggested.
The above-mentioned impacts of the information age change the expectations and requirements for refining the student study habits. The educational style can no longer be a quantitative approach to information, but its qualitative processing. A systematic analysis of data includes the ability to effectively organize information, evaluate and identify relevant from irrelevant material, set priorities and practical use of content, as well as seek interpretations and apply new findings in context. Considering the student immediate future, they also need to cultivate abilities to apply acquired information in their job practices. For this, they need to express attitudes, formulate opinions, both, in a spoken as well as written form, and offer solutions to newly arising situations. To succeed, they need good argumentation, negotiation, presentation and problem-solving skills for which critical thinking is a prerequisite. A wide scale of critical thinking definitions can be found in literature. For the purpose of this paper, definitions reflecting the attributes of the educational purposes have been chosen. The pedagogical discussion bases on the Bloom’s Taxonomy of Educational Objectives (Bloom 1956, Steel et al 2007b), one of the most influential pedagogical theories of the 20th century. This theory focuses on evaluation of target competencies in relation to the cognition process. According to the levels of complexity and mastery, Bloom described a sequence of six individual stages of the cognition chain as 1/ knowledge, 2/ comprehension, 3/ application, 4/ analysis, 5/ synthesis and 6/ evaluation. As with most theoretical models, the Bloom taxonomy raised a number of controversies and an avid professional discussion. It was revisited through a number of updates, one of which redefines individual stages to recognize its cognitive, affective and sensory nature by identifying two basic domains: 1/ the lower order (knowledge of facts, notions and procedures) and 2/ upper order (comparison, evaluation and application) thinking skills representing concrete vs abstract knowledge (Anderson, Krathwohl et al. 2001).
The Bloom taxonomy and related definitions of cognition processes have been the center of current debates of the pedagogical sector. Some experts accentuating the need of promoting critical thinking skills and their implementation in teaching practices (Klooster 2001, Steel et al 2007a) first focus on determining cognition processes that do not classify as critical thinking. Memorizing as a mechanical retention of knowledge without further application stands as one example as it represents an elementary fragment of the cognition functions only, the first stage of the Bloom’s taxonomy.⁴ According to Aderson, Krathwohl at al. (2001) version, knowledge as a result of memorizing is being defined within the first, lower order thinking skill domain. During the pre-information age, accent on memorizing encyclopedic data prevailed, in the times of an utterly unlimited access to information, however, it becomes irrelevant. Another cognitive process that does not qualify as critical thinking is comprehension. To understand content is a precondition for a correct manipulation with the material, however, from the perspective of cognition processes, it still represents a form of a passive reception of existing frames, procedures, ideas or concepts rather than its active use. Within the above-described taxonomy, understanding also classifies within the first, lower order thinking skill dimension since it does not activate the upper order cognitive processes yet. During instruction, accent on comprehension is typical for still widely used frontal type of teaching. The last cognitive process identified as not correlating with the principles of critical thinking is intuitive or creative thinking. This type of cognitive process bases on spontaneous or momentary reactions rather than on critical reflection at a given topic and is frequent in the field of sport and art, or known as a form of undesired shortcut reactions to impulses that would require a more profound understating or a com-plicated solution to a given problem. Critical thinking, in the context of the Bloom taxonomy and its later two-dimensional variation, defines as the upper order cognitive dimension which requires the ability to analyze, synthesize, evaluate and apply (Anderson, Krathwohl et al. 2001). A comprehensive description of critical thinking offers David Klooster (2001), who defines it through the following five key attributes: 1 Critical thinking is independent thinking. Freedom to think independently is the foundation for confident opinion building and attitude formation. 2 Information is the starting point of critical thinking, not the end point. Memorizing or memory-based learning is no longer sufficient or attainable, considering the quantity of accessible data. 3 Critical thinking begins with questions, with problems to be solved. To orient in the complicated reality, the society members need to be responsive to problems and open to seek solutions (Bean 1996). 4 Critical thinking seeks reasoned arguments. Basic principles of argumentation base on facts and evidence. 5 Critical thinking is social thinking. Basic attributes of a functional society are the ability of a dialogue, discussion, team work and presentation of attitudes. Seen through the lens of these attributes, critical thinking becomes a key competence for a modern society. In the context of the information boom, the ability to form opinions as well as to defend them stands is a precondition for solving complicated problems of the current world and is a basis for social advancement. For that reason, an efficient implementation of the principles of critical thinking into educational practices also constitutes the main challenge to the tertiary education.
As students need to adopt qualitative changes in their study approaches, teachers need to advance their teaching styles and methods. The idea of implementing the principles of critical thinking into teaching practices was first formulated and piloted as part of an educational reform in many US school districts in the 1980-ies (Steel 2001). Subsequently, Meredith a Steel (2000) elaborated the idea into a concept called Reading and Writing for Critical Thinking (RWCT). Currently, this model has already become an integral part of most modern educational systems. Upon the communist regime collapse in the Central and Eastern Europe, the RWCT principles were further advanced as part of an USAID project called Orava which was coordinated by the Slovak partners and run during the period between 1994 and 1999. The project held 24 partner countries mainly from the post-communist states in Europe and Asia to share a common aim, to initiate an efficient change into their educational systems that would implement modern teaching methods tested and ap-plied in Western partner countries (Steel 2001:2). The Orava project further elaborated the RWCT concept in two areas. First, it identified so called ‘coop-erative teaching’ methods as a variety of class interaction set-ups that lead to a more efficient and inter-active teaching as well as enhance student communication skills. Second, it provides methodologies and techniques to a development of individual study skills and competencies. ⁵By this, the concept rep-resents a balanced system of methods, approaches and techniques focused on both, student and teachers. During its progression, the RWCT project-initiated training centers with certified trainers who provide further education and training for teachers and educational institutions within the partner countries. The RWCT initiative has remained active after the project completion in many of the participating countries. It has been represented by central organizations on local as well as global level. The Reading and Writing for Critical Thinking International Consortium portal (www.rwctic.org) offers materials for international dialogue and experience Exchange. In the Czech Republic, the organization Criticked myeline, e.g. (www.kritickemysleni.cz) cooperates with non-profit organizations, educational and free-time institutions as well as school establishments through teacher and leadership trainings, seminars or various public events. As mentioned above, the information technology affects the hierarchy of teacher-student relationship. While the students and teachers enjoy an almost equal access to information, their roles change char-acter. The teacher, rather than a mentor becomes a mediator, while the student, correspondingly, be-comes a partner. As a result, the students take over a larger portion of responsibility for their learning process as they enjoy a considerably more active role within as well as beyond the educational space (Bowell & Kemp 2002: ix). The critical thinking process, therefore, logically abandons the traditional frontal teaching styles in which the teacher as a central element used to provide information, definitions or explanations of basic concepts, and transcribes the teacher-student relationship into a partnership. In a transformed form of teaching, the teacher helps promote development and training of key competences for managing information and content through stimulation of information processing and management as well as through organizing class interaction. The RWCT concept represents a complex, balanced and interrelated system focused on both, the development of essential study and professional competences for students, as well as, teaching methods and techniques for teachers or educators. The students develop their reading, text and content analysis skills from printed or audio-visual resources, they practice their writing and text composition, and cultivate their communication competences for to efficient presentation of their solutions or attitudes. The teachers, at the same time, utilize a series of „cooperative teaching “techniques (Steel et al. 2007e) described through variable class set-ups in pairs, small or mid-size groups, or space-using techniques to boost interaction and activate all students during instruction. These techniques can be implemented in both the traditional or modern class equipment. At the end of the 20-st century, the International Literacy Association (ILA) described the RWCT concept as a three-phase learning model (Steel 2001, Steel et al. 2007c, Steel et al. 2007e). Its individual phases form a complex system that aims at developing key study and communication competences. The first phase called evocation describes techniques that serve to activate existing knowledge, attitudes or impressions in order to raise interest for a given topic and motivation for learning. The second phase named realization of meaning is a follow-up step which takes upon the introduced topic with a new content. Only during this stage, the students are challenged with expanding resources potent with new information. The third stage known as reflection orients on application of the newly acquired con-tent into context, its implementation into practice and utilization for problem solving. The key principle of all three phases is to lead the students through an active involvement during instruction by participating in cooperative teaching activities which lead to activation and development of key study and communication competencies and a long-lasting knowledge retention. The aim of the following text is to demonstrate the three-phase critical thinking concept as an optimal system of study and teaching methods and techniques adoptable across the whole educational spectrum. It is to argue that the concept promotes a balanced development of key competencies that are a prerequisite for succeeding not only during the student educational efforts but also, and mainly, within the competitive job market in a local and global scale.