CRITICAL READING IN EFL COURSES: THE FACILE AND CHALLENGE CONFRONTED

Abstract

Although critical thinking has been on the agenda for the past few decades, there is a serious gap in the field of foreign language teaching especially for quantitative research carried out regarding the teaching of this process as a skill. When the case is the teaching of critical thinking in EFL courses more specifically, teaching critical reading skills shares the same problem as one of its sub-skills. Yet, it is of utmost necessity to proliferate this kind of research to reach beyond epistemological deductions to delineate the borders of such a significant skill. Thus, the current study is designed as quantitative research that aims to contribute to foreign language teaching literature utilizing the procedures of both descriptive and inferential statistics. In this sense, a specifically developed critical reading scale was chosen and distributed to the third-year EFL students of a state university in Turkey to obtain the required clear data to detect any probable connection between their age and attitudes and to assess their evaluation concerning the easiest and hardest sides of the critical reading process. The results indicated beneficial findings for the interests of EFL literature.