The effect of critical thinking embedded English course curriculum to the improvement of critical thinking skills of the 7th grade secondary school learners

Evolving trends of the 21st century require the continuous development of individuals to become competent in using the skills of the era effectively. Critical thinking is one of the basic skills of the century for the intellectual development of the individuals to sustain the global welfare. It is the combination of one's cognitive ability to make interpretation, analysis, evaluation, inference, explanation, self-regulation with affective attitude to integrate these cognitive skills in one's thinking and behaviors. Infusion of these skills and attitudes into the subject matter content is one of the many efforts for the training of individuals to think critically. However, this training has been commonly associated with higher order thinking capacities of adults regarding the scientific issues mostly. The main hypothesis of this study was the possibility of critical thinking training in a secondary school context with elementary level of EFL learners. While keeping Standard ELT curriculum for the control group (n=31), the study aimed to measure the effectiveness of critical thinking incorporation into the English course in the treatment group (n=31). Having concurrent embedded mixed method research design; this study used various data collection ways. Quantitative data was gathered through Critical Thinking Skills Scales (Demir, 2006) conducted as pretest and posttest and the observation checklist completed for the critical thinking development of each student. Furthermore, the research journal, student diaries and interview were the qualitative tools to make comprehensive analyses on the perceptions. The statistical and content analyses showed that the treatment group statistically outperformed the control group in the development of critical thinking skills. Qualitative data indicated that the critical thinking embedded English course design was effective for the improvement of both the language and critical thinking skills. Moreover, the instruction process was motivating for the learners thanks to its meaningful, fun, authentic and supportive nature. Keywords: Critical thinking, Critical thinking embedded English course design