º— Incorpóranse formalmente al Sistema Único

I started to conduct the final study in February 2011 after receiving approval from the university. I got permission from the language institute authorities to attend during the registration week to remind teachers about my project and find out who was interested in participating. Although it was a busy week, I managed to meet the teachers for a short coffee break, and one of them immediately expressed her willingness to participate in the study. The next step was to meet the students the following week to introduce myself and obtain their consent to take part in the study. I entered the classroom with the teacher, Amina. All the students were interested in participating and signed the consent form. They were no different from the pilot study students. I found them easy to approach and they started asking questions like how did I get a scholarship and what was it like to do postgraduate studies in the UK. At the end of the first meeting, the students kindly assured me that they would do their best to cooperate with me because, in their words, they were proud to see a Saudi woman who could be a role model for their academic success. It was a relief to hear this from the students, who were more willing to participate than some of the teachers, who were suspicious about the study. In the following paragraphs I will describe what happened in the different phases of this study, following the SPARE model.

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Phase one

Before introducing the critical thinking lessons into the speaking classroom, the learners were asked to provide background information about their experiences of learning English and practising speaking in the classroom. For this purpose, questionnaires were administered to all student participants. Then, I started to interview the students and included those who appeared to have different answers in their questionnaires. I ended up with 10 interviewees out of the 18 students. Prior to the start of the thinking lessons, the teacher received three introductory sessions on critical thinking designed and introduced by myself (see AppendixO). The aim was to broaden the teacher’s understanding of the meaning and components of critical thinking. Examples of activities and from research were discussed with the teacher. She was given the book Thinking Skills Through MFL by Lin and MacKay (2004), that included detailed explanations of how to conduct critical thinking lessons in a foreign language classroom. The teacher was free to choose between using these activities and designing her own. She asked me to prepare the mysteries owing to the large number of activities she was engaged in at the institute. I discussed with the teacher the results from the baseline data (see sub-section 4.3.4), to help her think of activities that could improve the quality of classroom talk among the learners, and so that she could take into account their suggestions concerning the types of activity they wanted to do. We thought that providing learners with lists of argumentation markers and simple phrases would help them to convey their ideas and to indicate agreement or disagreement, and therefore develop their pragmatic skills. I suggested a variety of sources. The teacher had been teaching for over 20 years and she had more experience than I did. In order to allow her long experience to shape the implementation of the intervention, I did not interfere with her decisions during the study, since I thought this would produce better results. Also, I wanted to adhere to the naturalistic inquiry approach where incidents are investigated in a natural setting. Before starting the first thinking lesson, I introduced the learners to the meaning of

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critical thinking and to what a critical thinking dialogue looks like (see Appendix P). The reason for doing this was that, according to the baseline data, some learners associated argumentation with criticism, so it was important to correct such misunderstandings regarding critical thinking and introduce examples of critical thinking dialogue.

Six critical thinking lessons were given to the learners during the first six weeks: two involving topic discussions, two involving mysteries and two involving image reading. Before starting each lesson, the teacher modeled argumentation with the learners through presenting a dialogue and asking them to role play the dialogue. They then had to underline the pragma-linguistic markers. I sat at the back of the classroom, having placed four recorders in different places in order to obtain accurate recordings. I observed the class and made shorthand notes. When I observed an interesting incident, I asked for interpretations from the participants. After the lesson had ended I followed the students out of the classroom with one of the audio recorders left turned on in order to obtain their comments. I did the same with the teacher: she was interviewed informally to elicit her views. At the end of the sixlessons, a focus group was conducted to identify the merits and challenges of these lessons as perceived by the learners. Following the SPARE model, the focus group represented the Evaluation phase (see Appendix C). I summarised the results of the focus group for the teacher and left her to make changes according to her own views and experience.

Phase two

After the focus group, another SPARE cycle started. Six further lessons were introduced until the end of the semester: two topic discussions, two mysteries and two image readings. No modeling sessions were used during the second phase. I continued to take notes and observe the class, and to engage in informal chats with both the learners and the teacher. At the end of week six, I conducted final interviews with the teacher and students and distributed the questionnaire to all

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students. During all 12 lessons, I kept my participation to a minimum and did not intervene in the conducting of the lessons.