Critical Thinking Development in Foreign Language Teaching for Non-language-majoring Students

This paper deals with the problem of critical thinking development in EFL teaching. Having analyzed the definitions of critical thinking, Bloom's taxonomy of pedagogical aims was chosen as a basis for the development of these skills. According to his chain “knowledge-comprehension-application-analysis-synthesis-evaluation” the block-schemes application while analyzing texts in the process of ESP teaching was selected. The results obtained by the students of the experimental group confirmed the hypothesis that using these block-schemes for working with texts allowed non-language-majoring students to understand the main ideas and to answer the questions more efficiently due to developing such skills as analyzing, synthesizing and evaluating the material.