The Bilingual Instructions in Developing Critical Thinking Skills Inliterary Appreciation of Cbeastudents-An Action Research

The trend of better teaching and learning is oftentimes the results of bilingual instructions. Though it is encouraged that in the tertiary level the target language which is English should be the medium; it is quite disturbing for an educator to observe that many students could not communicate well by using the prescribed medium only. According to the University of Tennessee, "Children in foreign language programs have tended to demonstrate greater cognitive development, creativity, and divergent thinking than monolingual children. Several studies show that people who are competent in more than one language outscore those who are speakers of only one language on tests of verbal and nonverbal intelligence. (Bruck, Lambert, and Tucker, 1974; Hakuta, 1986; Weatherford, 1986). The focus of this classroom research was to observe how successfully students could develop critical thinking through bilingual instructions in their literature class. The result has shown that students could apply the identified characteristics in this study to develop critical thinking skills by using both the languages used for classroom instructions. In the sample outputs, the ones developed solely in English language did not elaborate more substance for better understanding. Both student writers and speakers fall short in terms of widely using the English to express vivid ideas about what was being written or spoken about. On the other hand, when they were given freedom to develop their work making use of Filipino language; their outputs turned out to be better because they were able to explain clearly the points they were trying to drive at.