More than words? a corpus-based analysis of educators’ conceptualisations of critical thinking

Despite being one of the mainstays of 21st century curricular reforms around the world, critical thinking is not always effectively taught in the classroom. There is evidence that educators are under-prepared to teach it and planned efforts to address this problem by policy makers are lacking (e.g. Ab Kadir 2017, 2016). Previous studies have looked at educators conceptualisations of critical thinking through the lens of educational qualitative research but little research from a linguistic perspective has been conducted. Turning its lens on the possible disconnect between theory and practice in critical thinking teaching, this corpus-based study investigates the linguistic representation of current scholarly thought on critical thinking through key words identified in a corpus of academic articles on the topic. It then matches the results with key words gathered from in-depth interviews exploring conceptualisations of critical thinking with three educators. Subsequent collocational analysis will show that areas of both convergence and divergence between theory and practice may exist. Findings have the potential to inform teacher learning and education in critical thinking as well as extend the body of knowledge of linguistics and critical thinking.