Critiquing Journal Articles in Writing Classrooms and Its Effect on English Major Students’ Argumentative Writing Development

Abstract

Despite all the attempts to convince teachers and school authorities to support critical thinking (CT) skills in school settings, the application of CT skills has not reached a satisfactory point. Using a quasi-experimental design, the present study attempted to examine the effect of critiquing journal articles on English major students’ argumentative writing abilities. To develop CT skills among language learners and improve their argumentative writing abilities, the strategy of critiquing journal articles was applied to a semester of foreign language writing classroom instruction of the experimental group for the results to be compared later with the performance in a control group. This comparison was made through the analysis of covariance, which revealed that the experimental group performed significantly better than the control group in writing argumentatively. This, in turn, demonstrated that critiquing journal articles as a pedagogical strategy in classrooms could significantly affect English as a foreign language learners’ argumentative writing performance.