CONDITIONALS AT THE CROSSROADS OF CONVERGENT AND DIVERGENT THINKING

Abstract

MARINA KHARATYAN, LUSIK VARDANYAN - CONDITIONALS AT THE CROSSROADS OF CONVERGENT AND DIVERGENT THINKING The present research is an attempt to emphasize the current necessity in EFL teaching to reevaluate and reconsider the content of grammar on the discourse level through the core elements of critical and creative thinking. We do not seek to give a resourceful explanation to the concept and theory of critical and creative thinking; our foremost concern is to show how the knowledge of these two types of thinking can be linked to and identified in Grammar instruction. Driven by the pursuit of the 21st century learning goals and requirements and the urgent necessity of developing students’ higher order thinking skills, we seek to explore the impact of these two types of thinking on the quality of students’ academic performance in grammar classes through identifying the reciprocal link between grammar and critical-creative thinking. We also seek to evaluate students’ grammatical competence through determining the extent to which they acquire and master the core elements of grammar through the core elements of critical and creative thinking. We are free of the bias to regard Grammar as a sentence-level phenomenon as this kind of view is incompatible with the notion of competency-based instruction. Through introducing an integrated approach, we propose teaching Grammar in a variety of contexts with the intent of exposing not only morphological and syntactical peculiarities of a certain grammatical phenomenon but also its sociopragmatic aspects. What we should call in mind from the outset is that creative thinking is divergent and critical thinking is convergent. Divergent (creative thinking) focuses on a multitude of choices and solutions since it opens up the mind guiding it through different directions and possibilities; convergent (critical thinking) involves exact information and data, analysis and one possible solution to the problem.