Thinking skills and techniques to ehance students' reading and writing.

In Malaysia 's drive towards vision 2020, the development human resources, the talents, skills and creativity of the people is ultimate goal. Malaysia's secondary school, efforts have been made to teach students beyond the basic skills by equipping them with thinking skills.So, teaching of thinking skills in language classrooms,   specifically for enhancing the teaching of reading and writing skills is important.
     Swartz and Parks (1994) proposed three general approaches to teach thinking skills.  First, we have the direct instruction of thinking in non-curricular  contexts, which is often called the teaching of thinking. Teaching thinking by direct instruction means that, students learn how to use explicit thinking strategies guided by teacher. Secondly, teaching for thinking which involves using techniques to promote students' deep understanding of the context, such as using cooperative learning, graphic organizers, higher-order questioning and inquiry learning. Thirdly, teaching of thinking skills using the infusion approach  that emphasized on skillful thinking, so that students can improved the way they think.
      Thinking seems to be enhance by the deeper understanding of knowledge, but knowledge alone is not sufficient.A deeper understanding of knowledge forms the basic for active use knowledge and skills. There are some ways to teaching for deeper understanding and thinking. First allow students to play an active part in the teaching and learning processes.Secondly, classroom activities that employ collaborative problem solving seem to have the potential for teaching children how to deal with complex tasks and to work with and learn from each other.Beside that, teacher jointly construct pedagogigal content knowledge for teaching thinking skills in their writing  classrooms.Teachers need to possess the attitudes and belief necessary to teach thinking skills . It is because  teachers' views of teaching and learning influence their teaching in the classroom.In addition, language abilities and thinking competencies shape each other.
     Teaching thinking skills and techniques has positive effects on students' reading and writing achievement.Students who are have thinking skills will help them learn better than before.