Critical thinking, a vital skill for the 21st century, has become a desirable educational outcome by educators. Promoting students' critical thinking has been a concern in various educational settings and the role of teachers is considered to be the most significant factor for successful instructional implementations. The present study aims to examine the effects of WebQuest-supported critical thinking instruction on the critical thinking disposition levels of Turkish pre-service teachers (PTs) of English and to determine whether receiving WebQuest-supported critical thinking instruction leads to a change in the PTs' understanding of critical thinking. Data were collected from 60 freshman PTs studying at a state university in Istanbul, Turkey. Thirty PTs were assigned to the experimental group and received WebQuestsupported critical thinking instruction, while 30 PTs were assigned to the control group and received traditional text-only instruction. The study lasted seven weeks and data were collected by means of the Turkish version of the California Critical Thinking Disposition Inventory and semi-structured focus group interviews conducted before and after the treatment. Findings revealed that the WebQuest-supported critical thinking instruction produced statistically significant differences in the PTs' critical thinking disposition levels and the PTs demonstrated clearer awareness of critical thinking at the end of the study.
Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) has a dual focus both on content and language teaching in which students learn through and about language and provides contextualized and meaningful situations. Although studies on the impact of CLIL on learners' vocabulary knowledge and reading comprehension have mostly positive results, related research is highly limited in Turkish context. Thus, this study aims to examine to what extent CLIL students differ from non-CLIL students in terms of their reading comprehension and vocabulary size (i.e. receptive and productive). Data were collected from 124 fifth-grade students by means of the reading parts of the Cambridge Key English Test, the 2,000-word frequency-band of the Vocabulary Levels Test (Schmitt, Schmitt, & Clapham, 2001), and the adapted version of the Vocabulary Knowledge Scale (Paribakht & Wesche, 1997). Results of the study showed that the CLIL students significantly outperformed their non-CLIL counterparts in reading comprehension, receptive and productive vocabulary knowledge.
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