AN INVESTIGATION OF STUDENTS’ CRITICAL THINKING ABILITY IN READING

Using critical thinking is one of the important skills that should be mastered by students in reading. It is useful for them to know the purpose of the text and the text types they read. However, most students still found it difficult to use critical thinking in reading because they are not accustomed to using their critical thinking while reading the text, like finding the main idea and synonyms of words that are suitable to the context of the sentence. This research is to find out the research questions: 1). what are the types of critical thinking skills used by students in reading comprehension? 2). what are the problems encountered by the students when using critical thinking skills in reading? It is descriptive qualitative research which is mostly described in written text. It was conducted in the English Department of IAIN Lhokseumawe, especially the fifth-semester students who passed the Writing III subject and were learning Academic Writing subject. To collect the data, the researchers used a questionnaire with 22 statements and an interview. In analyzing the data, they used the Likert scale technique for the questionnaires and used Miles and Huberman for the interview. The findings show that based on the questionnaire sheets of students, it is discovered that among other critical thinking skills, the inference is the one that is often used by students as critical thinking ability in reading, which is 15%. It means that students have the ability to infer the meaning of the proverb from the reading text, to predict the main idea of reading text from title or subtitle, to speculate from various clues (e.g. context) when they cannot understand the text, to make reasonable inference without reading the rest of the text and to understand the implicit conclusion. Analysis skill is used as an average score of 9.2%. The explanation skill is used less, with an average percentage is 6.7%. Next, evaluation and interpretation skill is used less with average percentages are 5.7% and 5.25% respectively. The least used by students is self-regulation skills, with an average percentage is 5%. Moreover, six problems made students seemed difficult to use critical thinking skills in reading; lack of practice, lack of language mastery, implied meaning, background (prior) knowledge, repetition, and lack of vocabulary. In brief, to think critically about the passage, students should early improve their language competency itself.