Critical thinking cultivation in TESOL with ICT tools: a systematic review

Abstract

The cultivation of critical thinking with the assistance of Information Communication Technology (ICT) tools has drawn much attention from researchers and practitioners in the field of Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL). With the purpose of exploring whether the application could help improve students’ critical thinking and ESOL (English for Speakers of Other Languages) skills and how ICT tools are applied in TESOL to cultivate critical thinking, a systematic review was conducted and a total of 22 eligible studies were analyzed. The results show that: (1) students’ critical thinking and ESOL skills have demonstrated improvement in the studies applying ICT tools to TESOL; (2) the ICT application is unbalanced across different ESOL skills and various types of ICT tools have been used in different ways to promote students’ critical thinking.

Keywords:

• ICT tools
• critical thinking
• systematic review
• TESOL
• ESOL

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This study is funded by Humanities and social science research project of Ministry of Education of China [21YJA740022].

Notes on contributors

Dan Lu

Dan Lu is a professor in School of Foreign Languages in Northeast Normal University in China. Her research interests include critical thinking cultivation in TESOL and learning environment design.

Ya-Nan Xie is a librarian in the library in Northeast Normal University in China. Her research interests include information literacy cultivation and higher-order thinking development.