Promoting critical thinking skills for EFL learners’ through teaching reading and writing.

Abstract

Developing critical thinking skills for students has been set as a primary goal in higher education for decades. The study is an attempt to examine the possibility of teaching thinking skills through the teaching of reading and writing method, it explores how thinking and reasoning abilities as manifested in argumentative writing skills can be improved re. Students ’ creative and critical thinking skills and their ability to write logically and intelligently are part of EFL (English foreign language) teaching objectives. However, there are no explicit guidelines on how they could be achieved. Therefore, reading and writing considered to be a manifestation of critical thinking skills since the reader obtains the ability to question and the writer needs to analyse, evaluate and counter-arguments and present a logical text to convince the reader. This research discovers how teaching thinking skills are essentials for helping the learners make a link between classroom lessons and what they encounter in real life. However, neglecting thinking skills might cause a major handicap for EFL learners who might perform well in classroom settings but fail to bring what is learned about in the real world when needed. The research will take the case of third-year licence EFL learners’ and different teachers at Abdelhamid Ibn Badis university, Mostaganem. They were randomly given a questionnaire to fill it up in order to collect data. The dissertation will be divided into three chapters; the first one covers to the literature review while the second chapter devoted to the data analysis. The third chapter is mainly concerned with the findings, suggestions, and recommendations. The results obtained found that students’ critical thinking skills dramatically can be improved through teaching argumentative writing and reading as well they can develop positive attitudes towards learning English. The study concluded that there is possibility of teaching critical thinking skills in EFL classrooms.