HAVE YOU LOST IN TRANSLATION? JUMP IN TO THINK ABOUT 21ST CENTURY SKILLS!

 21st Century Skills and Language Learning

Hi everyone!

Today I'll be talking about 21st century skills. We are in the age of technology. Everything change swiftly day by day so does the term skill. We simply define 21st century skills as 4C. These are Communication, collabration, critical thinking and creativity. And I'll talk about each of them and their effects and relations on language learning.

 

The first one is creativity, we can simply define this as act of broadening our horizon. An urge to think in different ways for any topic. Learning a language is entering a new world. A world you just get in to advance and learn more. So this skill helps language learners to open up their minds and ease the process of learning. Creativity helps to see connections. Using your imagination and engage in learning better.

We do not always need to work alone. Sometimes we need a company. We can understand that collabration means working together with people to increase succes towards a shared goal.. When collabrating you share ideas, you make empathy with your collabrators and by collabrating people can easily solve problems. Just like in other fields, when learning languages collabrating with others increases the effectiveness of learning. It is a skill that can be easily applied in any stage of learning like working with a peer, groupworks etc. 

Next we have critical thinking. We cannot always accept everything we heard or that has been said to us. We must learn if it is true or not. So we should analyze and criticize these sayings. Critical thinking helps us analyze the problems and challenges, evaluate them and develop various strategies to overcome them. Critical thinking in language learning is a next level activity. It helps students to understand grammar or complex sentence structures and unkown terms etc. Teachers must work on strengthening the critical thinking skills of their students.

We all know what communication is but what is 21st century skill ''communication''? It is simply beyond just listening and speaking. It is about delivering your message effectievely in a way that the audience easily understand. It is also comprehension of different ideas and perspectives. Due to these qualities communication is one of the keys in language learning. It is vital for conveying your thoughts in target language and also understanding the country and culture of the target language.

In my perspective these four skills are cherry on the top for language learning. Lastly, we should remember that these skills boost even more and get more effective for students if we involve the technology in the case.

Thank you for your attention <3      

- beyza

References

Picture made by me using Canva

https://www.canva.com/design/DAGAFu9Djtw/GfhTYv2XRzL20sIxWujGKw/edit?utm_content=DAGAFu9Djtw&utm_campaign=designshare&utm_medium=link2&utm_source=sharebutton