Critical Thinking & interpreting
Why critical thinking is essential for interpreting practice?
Critical thinking involves logical thinking and reasoning including skills such as comparison, classification, sequencing, cause/effect, patterning, webbing, analogies, deductive and inductive reasoning, forecasting, planning, hypothesizing, and critiquing.
Benjamin Bloom (1956) developed a classification of levels of intellectual behavior in learning. This taxonomy identified six levels, and classifies a number of skills which can be used to develop critical thinking.
Bloom's Taxonomy:a multi-tiered model of classifying thinking according to six cognitive levels of complexity; a way of distinguishing the fundamental questions within the education system.
The terms for the six levels are defined as:
- Remembering: Retrieving, recognizing, and recalling relevant knowledge from long-term memory.
- Understanding: Constructing meaning from oral, written, and graphic messages through interpreting, exemplifying, classifying, summarizing, inferring, comparing, and explaining.
- Applying: Carrying out or using a procedure through executing, or implementing.
- Analyzing: Breaking material into constituent parts, determining how the parts relate to one another and to an overall structure or purpose through differentiating, organizing, and attributing.
- Evaluating: Making judgments based on criteria and standards through checking and critiquing.
- Creating: Putting elements together to form a coherent or functional whole; reorganizing elements into a new pattern or structure through generating, planning, or producing.
Applied in teaching, the terms mean:
- Remembering: can the student recall or remember the information?—-- define, duplicate, list, label, tell, memorize, recall, repeat, reproduce, state
- Understanding: can the student explain ideas or concepts? —— summarize, classify, describe, discuss, explain, identify, locate, recognize, report, select, translate, paraphrase, interpret
- Applying: can the student use the information in a new way? —— choose, demonstrate, dramatize, employ, illustrate, interpret, operate, schedule, sketch, solve, use, write.
- Analyzing: can the student distinguish between the different parts? —— appraise, compare, contrast, criticize, differentiate, discriminate, distinguish, examine, experiment, question, test.
- Evaluating: can the student justify a stand or decision? —— appraise, argue, defend, judge, select, support, value, evaluate
- Creating: can the student create new product or point of view? —— assemble, construct, create, design, develop, formulate, write.
Process of Interpreting:
- preparing (searching background material, predicting information and glossary before interpreting task)
- listening (receiving information)
- decoding (understanding the information, analyzing the meaning and logic)
- memorizing (storing the information in mind)
- encoding (reorganizing the information in target language)
- delivering (reproduce the information in target language)
- reflecting (self-evaluating and retrospection after interpreting task)
Skills for Interpreting related to critical thinking