Students’ Critical Thinking in EFL Classroom Discussion

DOI

10.2991/978-2-38476-501-0_28How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Critical Thinking; EFL Classroom Discussion; Revised Bloom’s Taxonomy

Abstract

Critical thinking is the ability to think logically, rationally, and deeply when evaluating information or situations before making a decision. This study aims to investigate the levels of critical thinking demonstrated by EFL students in classroom discussion based on the Revised Bloom’s Taxonomy (Anderson and Krathwohl, 2001) consisting of six cognitive levels: remembering, understanding, applying, analyzing, evaluating, and creating. The participants are sixth-semester students of the English Education Study Program at Universitas Negeri Medan. This study used a qualitative design, employing classroom observation. The outcomes indicate that discussion participation reflected a range of the taxonomy from lower-order levels. Based on the result investigation, Evaluating most frequent (57), second most frequent is Creating (31), followed by Analyzing (22), indicating that students are not only able to low level but also to critically evaluate ideas, form their own perspectives, and contrast those with other viewpoints. The frequency of assessing were able to provide reasoned judgments with evidence to support them and to generate ideas, respectively, analysis, which is also consistently observed, suggested they are able to identify relationships. In sum, this study highlights the need for creating open-ended reflective questions, providing guided facilitation, and establishing a positive environment to maximize students’ critical engagement, which is crucial for critical thinking required for college success.

Copyright

© 2025 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Feronika Lakamau
AU  - Rahmad Husein
AU  - Mahmud Layan Hutasuhut
PY  - 2025
DA  - 2025/12/16
TI  - Students’ Critical Thinking in EFL Classroom Discussion
BT  - Proceedings of the International Seminar of Languages, Arts and Literature Education (ISLALE 2025)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 298
EP  - 315
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-2-38476-501-0_28
DO  - 10.2991/978-2-38476-501-0_28
ID  - Lakamau2025
ER  -