Place of critical thinking in EFL

Abstract

Developing the ability to think critically is vital component of real, meaningful teaching and learning. Critical thinking helps us solve problems, make decisions and reach our goals. Thinking is not a passive but an active process. If students’ critical thinking skills are activated, for example while writing, very successful results can be attained. It can be said that critical thinking can be considered in two respects: to achieve a goal and to make a decision. As for teaching, there is very little evidence that students at universities acquire the skills of critical thinking in their learning and teaching activities. In accordance with its important place of in learning and teaching periods, it has been a concept recently highlighted in the field of EFL, like in many other fields of education such as mathematics, history and geography. The skill of critical thinking plays a great role and it has been accepted as an important step in every area of teaching and learning, particularly nowadays due to developments cognition and intelligence. So, in order to understand the awareness of the students for critical thinking, an experiment was performed in the fall of AY 2017-18, with 79 students in Karabuk University, Turkey. In this study, the significance of critical thinking and result of the experiments were discussed in detail, it also shed light on the students’ perceptions of it.