BUILDING CRITICAL THINKING SKILLS THROUGH LITERARY TEXTS IN EFL CLASSES

Abstract

Background: The chapter argues that building critical thinking skills and enhancing students’ cognitive processes has become a primary goal of teaching in secondary schools. It is generally agreed that the relationship
between learning and reading literature has always been very close. Also, literature is widely recognised as
an effective, motivating and enjoyable facilitator for work on critical thinking skills through challenging students’
cognitive processes by means of comparing and contrasting of and differentiating between the specific events
of the plot, analysing main characters, interpreting the meaning created by the author’s choice of words etc. For
these reasons this chapter investigates the efficacy of literary texts in building critical thinking skills in secondary
schools.
Purpose: The main focus of the chapter was on designing effective and feasible critical thinking model of
teaching instruction that incorporates literary text in EFL classroom to stimulate students’ cognitive processes.
Results: Many methods have been suggested to teaching reading literary texts. For the purpose of this
study the authors adopted personal growth model developed by Lindsay Clanfield. The model draws heavily on
learners’ involvement in reading with the aim of explaining the implied message of the literary text through employing crucial critical thinking skills such as problem solving, decision making, interpretation, logical reasoning,
and metacognition. The critical thinking model consists of the three stages defined as “challenge – comprehension – reflection”. Each of the defined stages focuses on utilising some of the six levels of Bloom’s taxonomy of
cognitive learning objectives through activities that promote these cognitive processes. For example, to complete
activities of the ‘challenge’ stage students rely heavily on their knowledge; cognitive levels of comprehension,
application and synthesis are essential at the ‘comprehension’ stage; finally, at the ‘reflection’ stage students
are involved in evaluation ideas of moral and social aspects discussed in the text and appraising of their acquired
experience. Drawing on this conclusion, the article presents a practical implementation of the model with the focus
on cognitive processes and development of critical thinking skills in teaching English through literary texts.
Discussion: In further research, it is necessary to experimentally verify the effectiveness of the critical thinking model in building critical thinking skills through literary texts in EFL classes.
Key words: Critical thinking skills, literary texts; personal growth model