Development of thinking and language skills through philosophy: a case study in Hong Kong

ABSTRACT

This article reports the results of a study that assesses the effectiveness of a Philosophy in Schools (PIS) programme in developing students’ thinking skills and English competence in Hong Kong. In the study, training and support were provided for three Integrated Humanities (IH) teachers to enable them to teach PIS to their Secondary 3 English as a Second Language (ESL) students. The students were found to be capable of reasoning and arguing in a competent way about philosophical problems arising from various stimuli prepared by their teachers according to the IH curriculum. PIS was also found to play a major role in promoting the students’ critical and creative thinking and to enhance the development of their English language proficiency to a significant extent. The findings of this study suggest that integrating philosophy into the IH curriculum can promote critical thinking, creative thinking and English language proficiency in ESL students.

KEYWORDS:

• Philosophy in Schools
• Philosophy for Children
• English language proficiency
• critical thinking
• creative thinking
• Hong Kong

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Quality Education Fund [2014/0080].