Students can activate their observation skills by heeding the actions of or artifacts by others and through reading intensively or extensively via the lens of creativity, critical thinking (CT), and problem solving (PS). To that end, teachers could foster their students’ observation skills by engaging them in age-appropriate creativity-based, CT, or PS activities that can render the students with opportunities to gain and construct knowledge and skills through witnessing, noticing, and evaluating. Here are some insightful reads.

Bakhtiari Moghadam, Z., Haddad Narafshan, M., & Tajadini, M. (2021). Development of a critical self in the language reading classroom: An examination of learners’ L2 self. Thinking Skills and Creativity, 42, 100944. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tsc.2021.100944

Dafouz, E. (2020). Undergraduate student academic writing in English-medium higher education: Explorations through the ROAD-MAPPING lens. Journal of English for Academic Purposes, 46, 100888. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jeap.2020.100888

Liang, W., & Fung, D. (2021). Fostering critical thinking in English-as-a-second-language classrooms: Challenges and opportunities. Thinking Skills and Creativity, 39, 100769. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tsc.2020.100769

Lim, J., & Polio, C. (2020). Multimodal assignments in higher education: Implications for multimodal writing tasks for L2 writers. Journal of Second Language Writing, 47, 100713. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jslw.2020.100713

Wechsler, S. M., Saiz, C., Rivas, S. F., Vendramini, C. M. M., Almeida, L. S., Mundim, M. C., & Franco, A. (2018). Creative and critical thinking: Independent or overlapping components? Thinking Skills and Creativity, 27, 114–122. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tsc.2017.12.003

Zhang, X. (2021). Assessing EFL students’ writing development as they are exposed to the integrated use of drama-based pedagogy and SFL-based teaching. Assessing Writing, 50, 100569. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.asw.2021.100569

Good luck,

I think one good way to improve students' observation skills is by: 1)involving them emotionally, which means proposing tasks where they feel involved (e.g., because they deal with things or topics they like or they know a lot about); 2)working with "real" or "authentic" materials, not necessarily materials that is designed to learn a language or a subject, but authentic things (e.g., corpora; extracts of articles written by native speakers for native speakers; extracts of FILMS with subtitles, etc.); 3)letting them work in small groups where they can exchange their ideas and produce an outcome together (the lecturer's supervision is necessary, otherwise they may end up talking in their native language and not English).

When students are interested, they can get their attention focused! Focusing is so important to observation!

Help them to make a good observation check list