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 aserious gap in the field of foreign language teaching especially for quantitative researchcarried out regarding the teaching of this process as a skill. When the case is the teaching ofcritical thinking in EFL courses more specifically, teaching critical reading skills shares thesame problem as one of its sub-skills. Yet, it is of utmost necessity to proliferate this kind ofresearch to reach beyond epistemological deductions to delineate the borders of such asignificant skill. Thus, the current study is designed as quantitative research that aims tocontribute to foreign language teaching literature utilizing the procedures of both descriptiveand inferential statistics. In this sense, a specifically developed critical reading scale waschosen and distributed to the third-year EFL students of a state university in Turkey to obtainthe required clear data to detect any probable connection between their age and attitudes andto assess their evaluation concerning the easiest and hardest sides of the critical readingprocess. The results indicated beneficial findings for the interests of EFL literature.