Art of Critical Thinking, Reading, and Listening

Course Overview

The course Art of Critical Thinking, Reading, and Listening (how to begin and proceed) is based on critical discourse analysis which is meant for all students who strive to recognize the manipulation strategies in writing and speaking, how they affect a reader or listener, and how to resist it. The course is a part and a parcel of general education that contributes greatly to communicative skills, reading, listening, writing, general literacy, and critical thinking.

Learning Outcomes

By the end of this course, students should be able to recognize manipulative strategies and distinguish objectivity from subjectivity; have a theoretical background and practical skills to analyze a text or speech; recognize hidden messages by identifying presuppositions, insinuations, omissions, modalities, topicalization, and gaslighting; relate discourse and social issues, including social cognition, politics, and culture. The knowledge acquired will lead students to think critically and without bias, contributing to a just and open society.

Course Content

№	Tentative Content of the Sessions
1-2.	The acquaintance with the course plan, the procedure of interactive lectures and seminars, assessment criteria, and learning outcomes. Lecture 1-2. Characteristic features of Language styles, and genres. Belles-Lettres style (epic, dramatic, lyric genres), Journalistic style (brief news coverage, feature article, oratory, essay), Scientific style (exact sciences, humanities, popular scientific prose), style of Official documents (governmental, military, legal, scientific, etc.).
3.	Lecture 3. Lexical Stylistic Devices (metaphor, personification, simile, epithet, metonymy, synecdoche, hyperbole, meiosis, litotes, allusion, antonomasia, irony, zeugma, pun, oxymoron, periphrasis, euphemism, antithesis).
4.	Lecture 4. Syntactical Expressive Means (inversion, detachment, suspense, enumeration, repetition, parallelism, chiasmus, asyndeton, gap sentence link, climax, bathos, ellipsis, break-in-the-narrative, represented speech, rhetorical question).
5.	Lecture 5. Critical Discourse Analysis
6.	Seminar 1. Recognizing the parts of a newspaper article as specific elements of the genre: Headline, dateline, byline, leading paragraph. Body of the article. Inverted pyramid. Parenthetical phrases. Modality.
7.	Seminar 2. Recognizing the covert parts of a newspaper article as specific elements of genre: Subjectivity and Objectivity. Manipulation: Insinuations and Presuppositions. Foregrounding and Backgrounding. Topicalization: agent-patient relations in sentences.
8.	Seminar 3. Three principles of literary structure cohesion. Recognizing Manipulation: Omission or Deletion. Libel by omission.
9.	Seminar 4. Manipulative element in speech: Gaslighting
10.	Seminar 5. Document evaluation and analysis; coming to well-reasoned conclusions and solutions, testing them against relevant criteria and standards
11. 12. 13.	Seminar 6. Skimming reading (to grasp the main idea), Scanning reading (to get to a particular piece of information), and Close or Intensive reading (with specific learning aims and tasks) of newspaper articles and documents. Raising vital questions, formulating them clearly and precisely
14.	Presentation of Individual Case Study 1: Reading article 1, listening analysis. Discussion.
15.	Presentation of Individual Case Study 2: Reading article 2, and listening analysis. Discussion.
16.	Presentation of Individual Case Study 3: Reading article 3, and listening to its CDA. Discussion.
17.	Presentation of Individual Case Study 4: Reading article 4, and listening to its CDA. Discussion.
18 -19.	Presentation of the Group Project “Guide to Recognize Manipulative Elements in Writing and Speech”
20.	Module test
21.	Summing up the results

Instructional Method

The course includes interactive lectures on the Art of Critical Thinking, Reading, and Listening, seminars; presentations of the Individual Case Study (analysis of a feature article or a document); presentation of a Group Project (compilation of a guide “Recognition of Manipulative Elements in Writing and Speech”; each participant adds and presents a part), and Module test (42 academic hours).

Required Course Materials

Internet resources, newspaper articles, documents

Assessment

Classroom Activities	Scores
Submission of the Written compilation of the course terminological apparatus	20
Presentation of the Individual Case Study: each student presents the analysis of an article or a document to the groupmates	30
Presentation of the *Group project* (individual part)	10
Participation in Discussion	10
*Module test* (written multiple choice test based on theoretical and practical information)	30
Total	100

Rating in scores	Rating a national scale	Rating scale ECTS
Rating in scores	Rating a national scale	Rating	Explanation
90-100	Perfectly	А	Perfectly (excellent performance with small number errors)
82-89	Good	B	Very good (above average some mistakes)
75-81	Good	С	Good (overall correct fulfillment of certain significant number of errors)
67-74	Satisfactorily	D	Satisfactorily (not bad, but with significant number of defects)
60-66	Satisfactorily	E	Enough (satisfies minimum criteria)
35-59	Unsatisfactorily	FX	Unsatisfactorily (with the possibility of re-assembly)
1-34	Unsatisfactorily	F	Unsatisfactorily (with the obligatory repeated course)