The Infusion of Critical and Creative Thinking within the Field of TEFL

This research was done to check the claim that Atkinson made which states that it is useless to teach English to the students of the eastern civilizations by adopting the critical thinking approach due to what he considers as their inappropriate environment. According to Atkinson (1997), eastern learners are members of cultures that are group-oriented and non-adversarial, often seeking harmony rather than conflict. Thus, applying the critical thinking approach on Arab learners would be a kind of imposing a Western orientation toward thinking and behaving on them which makes critical thinking for them difficult, if not impossible, given their cultural ways of thinking and dealing with the world. Are Syrian students, for example, deprived of such thinking? Not so, according to this research, if given the right equipment inside the classroom.