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research to present guidelines that focus on how EAP tutors can utilize cognitive skills and logical argumentation approaches to CT to provide feedback to students on their critical academic writing.


LITERATURE REVIEW


Previous research on the conceptualization of CT has tended to focus on undergraduate (UG) students (Phillips & Bond, 2004), UG tutors (Facione, 1990; Jones, 2015; Moore, 2013), on PGT students only (Durkin, 2008), or on international UG, PGT and PhD students together (Shaheen, 2012; 2016). In my research, I therefore aimed to focus on a comparison of the conceptualizations of CT at the PGT master’s level between international students and tutors.


Critical thinking is often considered to be a vague and elusive concept where there is little agreement over its definition (Abrami, et al. 2008; Davies & Barnett, 2015; Moore, 2013; Paul, 2011). Another difficulty when studying the topic of CT is that the conceptualization of what it means to be critical in higher education is an ever-widening circle. Davies (2015) and Davies and Barnett (2015) outline three major ‘movements’ in the development of CT in higher education: the ‘critical thinking’, ‘criticality’ and ‘critical pedagogy’ movements. Although it is acknowledged that other movements do make a contribution to the overall debate around CT, this paper locates itself in the critical thinking movement (CTM). Within the CTM, Lipman (2003) and Paul (2011) divide the conceptualization of CT historically between the informal logical (first) wave, which was in response to the limitations of applying formal logic


Andrew Drybrough


to natural language arguments (Govier, 1987), and the more eclectic (second) wave which includes the views of cognitive psychologists. An approach that equates CT to logical reasoning and argumentation is still practised today. Common topics covered in textbooks adopting this approach include the teaching of inductive and deductive reasoning, and valid and fallacious arguments (Robinson, 2011). For some writers, however, conceptualizing CT as logical argumentation is very limiting. McPeck (1981) noted that informal logic ‘plays a comparatively minor role’ (p. 8) in CT, and Brookfield (1987) also observed that being a critical thinker is not just limited to ‘logical reasoning’ (p. 13). The second wave of CT incorporated aspects of the first wave, but also focused on the cognitive skills involved in CT. Facione’s (1990) seminal work highlighted six core ‘cognitive critical thinking skills’: ‘interpretation’, ‘explanation’, ‘analysis’, ‘inference’, ‘evaluation’ and ‘self-regulation’. Facione’s research actually embedded key features of argumentation into some of these skills (specifically in the cognitive skills of analysis and evaluation). However, Davies and Barnett (2015) note that Facione’s categories are at times over descriptive and difficult to apply in real-world pedagogical contexts. To help overcome the difficulties of applying Facione’s categories, I turned to the work of Anderson et al. (2014) and Toulmin (2003) which are explained in more detail in the ‘Discussion and practical applications’ section below.


METHODOLOGY AND RESULTS


The findings of my research were based on semi-structured interviews with 14


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