Abstract Summary
With quality education in mind, this presentation offers thought-provoking suggestions on how literary texts can be utilized to promote students’ critical thinking and enhance their foreign language skills. The presentation is based on empirical research undertaken at a private university in the United Arab Emirates for one academic year.
Abstract :
Towards the end of the university stage, students studying in the United Arab Emirates are expected to have acquired English language and critical thinking skills, amongst other university requirements. Despite the efforts made within the field of teaching English, the output gained can still be better. The main concern of the current research is, therefore, to investigate the factors which inhibit university students’ progress in the areas of acquiring English language and critical thinking skills. Believing in the essential role literature plays in enhancing critical thinking and promoting foreign language skills, the current study introduces a course, designed and implemented by the researcher: Learn and Gain. The proposed course is fiction-based language teaching, adopting the view that literature is a resource rather than an object, thus advocating the use of literature as a main resource for acquisition of language and critical thinking skills. Investigating whether the proposed course was effective in improving university students’ English language and enhancing their critical thinking skills, a study sample taken from the study population was selected. Adopting an experimental design, the research project involved two groups: experimental and control. The experimental group students were exposed to the proposed literature course whilst the control group students were exposed to a general English language course. To examine treatment effectiveness, the researcher set and administered a pre-posttest. Divided into two main parts, critical reading and critical writing, the pre-posttest measured subjects’ critical reading and critical writing skills. Based on the statistical findings, the experimental group students’ performance on the critical reading pre-posttest and the critical writing pre-posttest was significantly better than their counterparts of the control group students. In light of the study’s findings, a number of recommendations have been made for English language teaching practitioners to consider.
