The development of inventive thinking skills in the upper secondary language classroom

This is a pre-publication version of the paper published in Thinking Skills and Creativity.

Please cite as Sokol et. al. (2008). The Development of Inventive Thinking Skills in the Upper-Secondary Classroom. Thinking Skills and Creativity, Elsevier, 2008, Vol. 3, Issue 1, pp. 34-46. doi:10.1016/j.tsc.2008.03.001

Alexander Sokol^{a b *}, David Oget ^b, Michel Sonntag^b and Nikolai Khomenko^b

 

^aTA Group, Latvia; ^bLGECO, INSA Strasbourg, France

 

 

 

Abstract

The given paper presents the results of an empirical study into the efficacy of the Thinking Approach (TA) to language teaching and learning which is aimed at the development of students’ inventive thinking skills in the context of foreign language education, namely learning of English. The study was conducted among upper secondary students of two schools in Latvia and aimed to answer whether students working with the Thinking Approach demonstrate an increase in their inventive thinking skills. An inventive thinking test was employed as the research instrument. The results of the study suggest that students working with the TA demonstrate a significant increase in their inventive thinking skills in comparison with the control group (t=3.32 , p=0.001). At the same time a number of limiting factors that appeared in the process of the study due to its naturalistic setting call for further research that could increase the reliability of the findings. 

 

Keywords: Thinking Approach; inventive thinking skills; EFL; TRIZ; OTSM.

 

1.      Introduction

Teaching thinking skills is not a new idea. Numerous programmes have been developed for teaching thinking as a separate subject: Feuerstein’s (Feuerstein 1990) CORT lessons, Lipman’s (Lipman 2003) Somerset Thinking Skills Course and many others. Many researchers have dealt with integration of thinking skills training into subject matter instruction (Swartz 2000), (Wiske 1998) where the authors point out that studies in the fields of humanities and art are not represented. The given study undertakes to investigate the effects of incorporating thinking skills instruction into the programme of teaching a foreign language, namely English.

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