Developing Critical Thinking Skills: Analyzing English Language Teaching and Question Formatting in Afghan High Schools

Abstract

Critical thinking is considered as one of the fundamental skills in the realm of education; many educational organizations focus on fostering this skill through its curriculum. Afghanistan's Ministry of Education strongly believes that education becomes meaningful when students’ ability for critical thinking is cultivated and nurtured, as it is the core of education. Thus, they put emphasis to nurture it within the context of any given subjects in schools, including English which is nowadays regarded as an important course in Afghanistan’s high schools.  The present research aimed to investigate whether EFL teachers at Afghan High Schools attempt to enhance critical thinking skill through questioning format. Using qualitative approach, the data was collected randomly based on non-participatory observation from 10 English classrooms of 10 High Schools in Balkh. The posed questions were analyzed based on Bloom’s Taxonomy.  The result indicates that 64% of the questions were lower order thinking and 2.4% of the questions were higher order thinking, while 33.6% of them were instructional questions that are not related to any levels of Bloom's Taxonomy.