Fostering of critical thinking skills through reading text

Abstract

This study explored how the strategies of critical thinking skills have been implemented by the participants while reading an English reading text. This strategy of the implementation of critical thinking skills can be used to foster critical thinking skills in English academic reading classes in ESOL contexts such as Bangladesh. This is the qualitative multiple case study approach where the researcher chose four students of the secondary level school for the purposive sampling technique of the reading session. All of the participants came from the mainstream Bengali school where the critical thinking skills of students are not much focused on. The think-aloud is one of the important part of the study where the main sources of data is about the reading strategies of the participants. In this process, the students verbalize their thoughts rather reading that silently. Students were instructed to have one piece of paper beside their reading text, so that while after reading each line where they have paused, they could note down their own thinking point of view that what they have understood from each line of the text. It explains the procedure of the strategies briefly which is used in taking reading comprehension texts (Jesson, 2011).In this study , at first there was two training sessions for the students as they were not familiar with the critical thinking strategies of reading texts through think –aloud protocol. The training sessions were held so that they can participate in a proper way in the final session of reading. The reading sessions and interviews were taken through zoom learning platform which took a total of four days to complete. The findings of the study revealed that the students used interpretation strategies of critical thinking skills more rather than other five strategies as it seemed that, they find it easier to do. The next strategies which were used by most of the students were analyzing, self-regulating respectively. It was seen that the inference skill was least used by the students. This study is significant for English language teachers of Bangladesh and any ESOL country because it will encourage teachers to use the think –aloud protocol to teach students how to think while reading. The reliability of the study wills other researchers implement the same methodology for future study. After completing the session of reading, the major issues that came out is that students feel difficulty in case of evaluation strategy, no matter whether he/she used to read English text or not, they find it more difficult to implement for which they need more practice. Besides, in case of other strategy such as analysis and explanation, it has also to be noted that they try to generate their ideas but they could not understand that how and from where they formed a new sentences through their ideas for presenting it. Though, all four of them used inferences and self- regulation. Therefore, they need more practice for having a smooth skill of the strategies of critical thinking skills for implementing that in the reading text.