DEVELOPING CRITICAL THINKING SKILLS IN ENGLISH LANGUAGE TEACHING CLASSES THROUGH NOVELS

Critical thinking is an intellectual concept that encourages individuals to analyze, evaluate and explain through interpreting ideas from a broader perspective. So as to encourage critical thinking among EFL (English as a Foreign Language) students, literary texts, can be a beneficial tool. This article aimed at paving the ways to make students achieve critical thinking skills through reading novels. The main purpose of choosing novels to establish critical thinking skills in students is that literature has been looked at as an object of study and this field was little treated as an applied field in the other aspects of language learning, especially critical thinking. In this study a mixed research design is followed. First, CAAP Critical Thinking Test is conducted to pre-service English teachers before and after the treatment. In the second phase, follow-up qualitative interviews are conducted with the volunteers only. In addition, a special course design is developed for their presentations during a 14 week period. As literature fosters the development of critical thinking skills, content-based instruction has been suggested by the researchers as an effective way to develop both critical thinking and language learning skills of the students.