The Effectiveness of Developing Students’ Critical Thinking Skills Through English Literature

Abstract

Critical thinking has become one of the more insisted-upon goals of contemporary English language education, yet the gap between this stated priority and what actually happens in most EFL classrooms remains considerable. This article examines whether and how the use of literary texts during English instruction can help close that gap, drawing on data collected during a six-week pedagogical internship at one state funded South Kazakhstan university. The participants were 17 first-year bachelor's students, working at approximately B1 proficiency level, with limited prior exposure to literary reading in English.
The study adopted a mixed-methods action research design. Three sources of data were used: written response tasks collected after six of the twelve instructional sessions, a Likert-scale questionnaire administered at the end of the internship, and field observation notes maintained throughout. Literary texts, including short stories, a poem, and adapted excerpts, were embedded within the existing curriculum and approached through pre-reading discussion, during-reading inference tasks, post-reading interpretive writing, and Socratic dialogue.
Four patterns emerged from the analysis. Students' written responses showed a gradual shift from text summary toward interpretive argument over the course of the internship. Self-reported confidence in evidence-based reasoning increased across the group. Discussion consistently functioned as the primary site of critical engagement, with written responses improving most noticeably in sessions that followed substantive dialogue. Finally, a pattern of initial resistance to interpretive ambiguity softened in most students over time, with several articulating what amounted to a genuine shift in how they understood the nature of textual meaning.
The findings suggest that literary texts can support critical thinking development in EFL settings when accompanied by discussion-centred, student-responsive pedagogy. The contribution of this study lies less in confirming what the broader literature already argues and more in documenting what this approach looks like within a specific institutional context in Kazakhstan, where such classroom-based empirical accounts remain scarce.