ABSTRACT
This chapter explores students’ transition into university level critical thinking practices. It is often assumed students can seamlessly adjust to what critical engagement with expertise entails in higher education. In Colour: Theory, meaning and practices, a first year undergraduate Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) writing module, the first assignment, a reflective summary, aims to support students’ critical thinking skills by summarizing a core reading, and by developing a critical response to one of its themes. However, student texts show that critical response is often understood as a need to find flaws, often expressed in disparaging evaluative terms, and echoing anti-expert rhetoric, rather than engaging in an evidence-based, open-minded, and tolerant dialogue. This chapter reports on a comparative analysis of weak, average and high scoring assignments and student survey/interview drawing on the LCT dimension of Specialization, which explores orientations to knowledge and knowers, and elements of systemic functional linguistics, specifically Engagement. The chapter reveals what is valued in students’ critical engagement with expert knowledge, and expert knowers and how explicit scaffolding may support the development of critical thinking.
