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Critical reading has been considered as the highest level of reading behavior for English Department students. Students are expected to be able to critically read both non-fiction and fiction texts. This situation, for sure, has made EFL students face lot of problems. This study is intended to reveal students’ problems, strategies, and reflections on critical reading. Revealing those three points becomes an academic effort to add knowledge about critical reading in the EFL reading comprehension course context. This study is approached through a descriptive qualitative research design which primarily focuses on students’ written responses on open-ended questionnaire and interview. The EFL students who join in Reading Comprehension III were asked to give written responses based on statement starters. Then, by purposefully selecting students, they were interviewed to gain more information on their reflection. The findings reveal that students have both linguistic and non-linguistic problems in doing critical reading. The strategies they used cover both reading skill and non-reading skill strategies. The students reflect that reading III course has helped them to sharpen critical reading skill in terms of text analysis, summary writing, and questions development activities. It is suggested to engage students with more activities to evaluate and to develop questions. For further research, exploring effective strategies to read critically is highly recommended.

The idea of integrating Islamic values in non-religion subjects is still in the process of shaping its format. Many possibilities and flexibilities of the integration are existing and practiced by English teachers at Islamic Junior High School—knowingly as Madrasah Tsanawiyah (MTs). Also, in the middle of endless idea of integration, teachers have been trying to apply the integration based on their beliefs and situation. This study outlines the teachers’ best practices on integrating Islamic values in English lesson at MTs in Jawa Timur. By using descriptive qualitative method, this study portraits 6 English as Foreign Language (EFL) teachers’ best practices. Data were taken from classroom observation, interview, and documentation which then were analysed as best practices. Best practices refer to the practice of integration which is considered as working practice from each teacher’s situation. The situation was mostly influenced by teachers’ lack of confidence to contextualize and operationalize the values into the teaching materials and activities, and the lack of model for integration. Further study on how to operationalize the integration, and on developing the model of integration will be worth exploring.

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Child stories and literary works have both recreative characteristics and humanity values such as personality moral, social moral and religious moral which can shape children’s ideal characteristics as a potential and strategic asset to help them to be civilized generation. The efforts to dig up the values from that two valuable sources are needed and the most possible way is through teaching the children how to appreciate child stories and literary works.