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

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.