Abstract:

This study aims to identify the perceptions of students about critical thinking skills and the factors which hinder critical thinking skills in reading at intermediate levels in the School of Foreign Languages at Anadolu University. The main reason for doing this research is that it is observed that students do not analyze texts while reading, so they just answer text questions for the sake of answering them. For this very reason, finding their perspectives about critical thinking and making them aware of the requirements of a text are crucial at this point. Furthermore, this research provides data about the elements which has vital factors on thinking critically while bringing a different aspect to the field of English teaching in that there is little research on the perspectives of students while there have been many research on critical thinking from the perspectives of teachers. As a medium, 100 students from different classes were asked to answer questionnaires, and after the questionnaires, 10 students from each class were interviewed to provide reliability. As an alternative, a future research can investigate whether the results are generalizable to the entire intermediate level students across the country by taking the samples of students from different regions of Turkey. Such information could then be used by teachers and curriculum planners to facilitate the use of critical thinking skills in reading.

Keywords:

Critical thinking, intermediate levels, learning English, Reading, skills.