FOSTERING CRITICAL THINKING SKILL TROUGH ARGUMENTATIVE WRITING

Susana Widyastuti

Abstract : the urgency for development srudents’ critical thingking (CT) abilities has left English as a foreign Language (EFL) teachers trying hard to integrate CT into their teaching practies. This study highlights how the elements of CT are displayed in students’essay written by the fourth semester Indonesian student taking essay writting course. The analysis is based on stapleton’s criteria of CT (2001).

INTRODUCTION

This study seeks to foreground the interconnections between critical thinking and language. The close correlation between thinking (cognition) and language development has long been recorgnized by scholars and educators, because it is trough language people come to know the world and express what they think about. It is particularly relevan for argumentative writing in the English as a foreign Language 9EFL) context because to make an argumentative writing people need to have both higher-order thingking skills and higher levels of foreign language proficiency (see A tkinson, 1997 : Chamot. 1995 Travin & Al-Arishi, 1991)

Critical thingking has been widely consi dered as an essential skill in the qwenieth century can particularly in the area of language education. Altough CT itself is a complex concept and is not easy to difine. It is an identife able thinking skill and thus can be practiced. Facione defines critical thingking as “purposeful, self regulatory judgment that result in interperetasion analysy, evaluation and inference as well as explanation of the evidintial conceptual, metholodological, criticalogical, or contextual considerations upon wich that judgment is based” (1990,. P.8)

METHODS

                The setting of the study is an essay writing course take by the 4th smester  student of the English literature study program. The language of instruction is English language levels and abilitiea vary and they frequently lack of confidence. This situasion is similary described in as study by Tsui (1996) wich also reveals that the cause is the lack of opportunitiesand willingness to use English in everyday context.

The data were the collection of students argumentative essays. The course ran for 16 weeks wisch were used mostly for writing practices. Each week students attend 2 classes wich ran for 100 minutes each. In wich lecturer talked to students intensively to discuss and give feedback to their writing. Such method was intended to stimulate students’ writing productivity and improve their confidence in writing , both in the conent and language aspects the feedback and evaluations focused on the writing progress by paying attention to each CT elemnt.


 http://dx.doi.org/10.21831/cp.v37i2.20157