ENHANCIN CRITICAL THINKING SKILLS THROUGH READING SHORT STORIES THE CASE STUDY OF SECOND YEAR LMD STUDENTS OF ENGLISH AT AMAR THLIDGI UNIVERSITY

Abstract

Enhancing critical thinking abilities is a desired general goal in education and a specific focus for EFLstudents. The current study focuses on the effectiveness of reading literary short stories in developing critical thinking skillsof 50 Second Year Students at the Department of English – University of Laghouat. This research is divided into three chapters : the first chapter contains the Theoretical Development in Reading Skills, it provides the reader with the definition of reading comprehension and its skills, . The second chapter deals with approaches to Critical Thinking: the review of the literature. Finally we provide a summary of the related studies. The third chapter is about the field work which contains the tools and steps of the study and at the end, the results concerning the hypotheses of the study were established. The data were collected through Pre-Post Test based on a questionnaire and a lesson about critical thinking processes as a remedy. This study took place during the second semester of the academic year 2016-2017. Students were asked to answerquestions to reveal about their reading comprehension strategies. The findings of the study showed that reading short stories made suitable tools for enhancing critical thinking skills.Also, the study came up with such a fact that short stories can establish critical thinking skills. Therefore, they are required to be included in the educational curriculum