ESSAY WRITING AMONG PRE-UNIVERSITY MEDICAL STUDENTS: CRITICAL THINKING OR READY MADE STRUCTURE?

A major part of a formal education, in recent years, is essays. Secondary students are taught structured essay formats to improve their writing skills, and admission essays are often used by universities in selecting applications. Essays are used to judge the mastery and comprehension of material in both secondary and tertiary education, therefore students are asked to explain, comment on, or assess a topic of study in the form of an essay. This study examined the critical thinking ability of pre-university medical students and its relationship to language proficiency especially in second language writing. The objectives of this study were to investigate the level of critical thinking by evaluating participants' essay based on The Holistic Critical Thinking Scoring Rubric (HCTSR), (Facione & Facione,1994) by two experienced English teachers. The study is based on a document analysis of 100 essays written by Foundation in Science (FIS) and Foundation in Allied Science (FAS) students at one of medical private university colleges in Malaysia. The findings showed that critical thinking levels among students are radically low. The researcher believes that this study can create the way forward to replacing the old cycle of transmission pedagogy with critical thinking pedagogy in language education