Developing critical thinking skills of EFL learners through a sequence of critical thinking tasks

Throughout history philosophers, educators, and many others have been emphasizing the importance of thinking skills for people to deal with a rapidly changing and developing world. Thinking skills are important for professional and social life. As one of the thinking skills, critical thinking skills are of the utmost importance for an educated person as it promotes versatile thinking. A critical thinker can perceive the world more differently as he or she can look his or her environment from different perspectives. In addition, critical thinking provides having a more sophisticated way of life. In the twenty-first century, people who are able to analyze, evaluate and generate good, valid ideas are in demand. Adapting critical thinking skills is a long-term practice and can be best learned and practiced at schools, especially in higher education. Although teachers appreciate students who are good at analyzing, evaluating, generating ideas and good at communication skills, there are still some problems related to teaching critical thinking skills. Therefore, this study aims to find out whether critical thinking skills of EFL learners can be improved through a sequence of critical thinking skills. This instructional design is taken from the work of Numrich and adapted to the content of the lesson. This study is both a qualitative and a quantitative study which lasted seven weeks. Out of first year 28 Physical Therapy and Rehabilitation department students at Hasan Kalyoncu University, Gaziantep, 10 were randomly chosen for the study and all the data was collected from them. At the beginning of the study, a questionnaire with close ?ended items and an interview were administered to see whether participants are aware of the CT skills. The same questionnaire and interview were administered at the end of the study to see to what extent students show development in the selected CT skills. To support the data gathered from questionnaires and interviews, students? minute papers were also collected. During the study, for each week a selected critical thinking skill was infused into the curriculum and all the tasks were arranged accordingly. Quantitative data were analyzed by using descriptive statistics as a component of case study. Research findings from qualitative data shed light on the efficacy of a sequence of and critical thinking tasks in improving critical thinking skills of EFL learners.