Improving the Engineering Students’ Critical Thinking Skills in English Reading Texts through Critical Reading Strategies

The purpose of this research is to improve the engineering students’ critical thinking skills while reading English texts by applying six critical reading strategies. The participants of the study included 30 engineering students who were randomly chosen and divided into two groups: treatment (N=15) and non treatment (N=15). The treatment group received instruction using the critical reading strategies in three stages. The first stage included summarizing and paraphrasing strategies , the second one facts vs. opinion, comparing and contrasting, while the third one comprised drawing conclusions, and text evaluations. On the other hand, the non treatment group received their regular instruction. The instruments of the study were; a critical thinking achievement test for English reading texts prepared by the researcher, and an adapted version of critical thinking rubric to assess the engineering students critical thinking skills when reading English texts. Data were collected and t-test was used for the statistical analysis. Results indicated that there was a statistically significant difference between the mean scores of the treatment and non treatment groups in the critical thinking achievement test favoring the treatment group.It was concluded that the present research provided evidence for the effect of the critical reading strategies on improving the engineering students’ critical thinking skills when reading the English texts.