The article presents the experimental study of using the technology of critical thinking development in the process of learning a foreign language. Despite the teachers" awareness of the importance of developing critical thinking, they lack knowledge ofthe methodology of forming critical thinking skills, in particular in a foreign language lesson. We have therefore developed a set of teaching and learning materials (lesson plans for teachers and handouts for students) to develop critical thinking in English lessons in the 7th grade, taking into account the nature and structure of this type of thinking, and methodological conditions of its development in foreign language lessons. The process of preparation of teaching materials included the compilation of the list of critical thinking skills that need to be formed in the 7th grade students in English, and the list of methods that help to develop these skills, selection of the topics for learning, designing the content of each lesson. In order to testthe effectiveness of these teaching and learning materials, an experimental study was conducted, which involved two groups of students (control group – 84 students and experimental group – 96 students) from four schools in Kyiv. In order to monitor a&nd assess the development of students" critical thinking at the beginning and at the end of the experimental lessons, pre-test and post-test were developed, as well as assessment criteria for each test task, which helped to obtain the most objective &results. The analysis of the results of the experiment allows us to confirm that the prepared teaching and learning materials are efficacious for developing critical thinking in students. The level of critical thinking skills formation significantly &increased in the experimental group of students. At the same time, there were no marked changes in the development of critical thinking of the control group students. This also led to the conclusion that critical thinking should be developed purposef&ully and systematically, carefully planning the lessons, taking into account the principles of the technology of critical thinking development when learning a foreign language in a particular class.
Експериментальне дослідження ефективності розвитку& критичного мислення під час навчання англійської мови в основній школі.
