Prevalence of Tertiary Level Students’ Critical Thinking Skills in Speaking

Abstract

Critical thinking is deemed vital to students’ success of learning. Not only does it help in processing information received through written and oral communication, but also it enhances the quality of language which is produced logically and reasonably. Critically thinking of what to say has been deemed intricate and more demanding by most students. Thus, this study is intended to investigate critical thinking of students at tertiary level, particularly critical thinking aspects demonstrated in speaking. To address this issue, this study deploys a case study qualitative design to gain in-depth, thorough, comprehensive understanding. Involving the second year university students, this study results in findings that some aspects of critical thinking are demonstrated by the students in their speaking performance, encompassing relevance, clarity, consistency, accuracy and fairness, and that trends of how these aspects of critical thinking occurs, entailing deductive and inductive reasoning, cause and effect, comparison, planning as well as hypothesizing, are interpreted and discussed. Therefore, critical thinking is necessary and this needs improvement if students’ success in the new world era is to be attained.

Integrating Compulsion Strategy to Improve Students’ English-Speaking Skills Through Podcast

“…Oral skills are used to improve speech intelligibility for effective communication (Richards & Rodgers, 2001); (Shafa et al, 2020); (Yaumi, Sirate, & Patak, 2018); (Xhomara & Shkembi, 2020); and (Pongsapan & Patak, 2021). According to (Ellis, 2007); (Anjaniputra, 2013); (Firmansyah & Valatansa vegian, 2019); (Maulana, 2021), speaking skill is the ability to speak up and to express idea structurally in any kinds of situation. (Anjaniputra, 2013); (Firmansyah & Valatansa vegian, 2019); and (Tambunan, Lubis, Andayani, & Sari, 2021) state that speaking skill is that one does activity to report acts or the ability to express a sequence of idea fluently using precise vocabulary and or appropriate words.…”

Students’ perceptions of applying critical thinking to learning and practicing English speaking skills

“…In his case study, Anjaniputra (2020) focused on understanding the prevalence of critical thinking in tertiary students' speaking ability in Indonesia. Although only top students were chosen for the study, not all characteristics of critical thinking, such as encompassing precision, logical correctness, and completeness, were clearly shown.…”

“…Although the effects of critical thinking on EFL learners' English proficiency have been the interest of some research papers, the specific impacts of such skills on learners' speaking ability have not been widely recognized. The papers all agreed on the impacts of critical thinking on students' speaking skills; however, students chosen for the papers are at high levels of English proficiency -intermediate (Sanavi & Tarighat, 2014), top students of the class (Anjaniputra, 2020) or they could benefit from critical thinking regardless of their English levels (Akatsuka, 2019). Furthermore, the context in which students have few opportunities to practice speaking skills was not clearly mentioned in those papers.…”

“…This could be explained by the traditional teaching and learning in the Vietnamese learning context in which teachers may misunderstand that their students are unwilling to participate in speaking activities in class (Tomlinson & Dat, 2004). In addition, critical thinking is often even challenging to higher-level students at colleges because they may not show enough standards of critical thinking such as logical correctness and completeness when they speak (Anjaniputra, 2020). Also, despite the government's efforts to re-design systematic the national examinations, those are mostly in written forms, such as reading comprehension and grammar; thus, the lack of verbal communication practice in studying English is inevitable (Le, 2011).…”

Teacher’s Strategies in Teaching Speaking for Students With Visual Impairment

“…Numerous previous researches related to teacher's strategies in teaching speaking has been conducted. Anjaniputra (2013) conducted a study to investigate teacher's strategies in teaching speaking to students at secondary level. It revealed that the strategies used by the teacher were cooperative activities, role-play, creative tasks, and drilling.…”