(Journal of English Language Teaching and Applied Linguistics) Volume 7, No. 1, January 2021 Page. 7 - 14 p-ISSN: 2356-2048 e-ISSN: 2356-203x 7 ENGLISH STUDENTS’ PERCEPTION ON CRITICAL THINKING PEDAGOGICAL TECHNIQUES Desty Febria English Education Department, Universitas Internasional Batam Email Correspondance: desty@uib.ac.id Abstract The purpose of the research was to discover students’ perceptions of critical thinking pedagogical techniques. The type of research was designed by using a survey that shared the link of online questionnaires to the participants. Based on the result of research, students agree if critical thinking skills should be taught during class and understood the pedagogical methods to develop a higher order of thinking skills. However, it needs more development in some techniques, and to see the implementation of this technique in their teaching practice. Keywords: Critical Thinking Skill, Pedagogical Techniques, English students. INTRODUCTION English proficiency is one of significant skills to be possessed by society in the era 4.0. It makes education sector especially higher education ones equip students with English as a general subject and make sure their students graduate with good English score. It is not difficult for English education department students to achieve great English proficiency score because they have been learning English since first semester. However, English is not the only competency that helps students compete in the global market nowadays. English students also need to develop other skills such critical thinking, collaboration, creativity, computation logic, communication, and compassion, or known as 21 st century skills. Besides hard skills are necessarily fulfilled by English students, they also need to develop their soft skills. 21 st century skills or called as 6C are important to promote students’ Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS). By gaining these soft skills, it will support students to survive in today’s challenging world. This is also in line with the aims of Higher Education ministry to develop students HOTS, Adaptive, Flexible, reading skill and Writing Skill. It means cultivating English language student’s ability to think at higher Desty… 8 level order of thinking has been crucial issue. Developing student’s critical thinking could not be separated with redesigning educational system. It encourages ministry of Education launching new regulation which is called Merdeka Belajar Kampus Merdeka (MBKM) in early 2020. This regulation supports student to construct their critical thinking skill by having a chance to choose their own learning activities inside or outside University. Thus, University needs to adjust its teaching and learning process to cultivate students’ critical thinking. Lipman (1988) defined critical thinking as fair judgements because it based on criteria, self-evaluation and putting perspectives in the context. Critical thinking is reflective and reasonable though that focused on determining what to believe or do (Ennis, 2011). Critical thinking is commonly described as higher order of thinking or known as Bloom’s taxonomy in educational sectors. The structure of cognitive development in Bloom’s taxonomy started from lower order of thinking to higher order of thinking, which is started from remembering, understanding, applying, analyzing, evaluating, and creating (Krathwohl, 2002). In addressing the global challenge, critical thinking becomes one of educational main foundations to developed in the school system (Ab Kadir, 2017) Enhancing English student’s critical thinking could not be separated from cultural background and pedagogical practices. Student does not acquire critical thinking instantly. Act and social practice evolve in the society gives contribution on how student shape their higher order of though. As mentioned by Atkinson (1997), critical thinking is a behavior naturally acquired by student as they grow up. He was conducted a research by comparing mainstream U.S children to non-mainstream US Children. From the result of research, he claimed that the existence of critical thinking presents in social practice among society. Atkinson and Ramanathan (1995) also found in their study about 80% English native speakers wrote more deeply on synthesizing their argument in writing compared to ESL students at US university. In response to critical thinking in student’s writing, Stapleton (2001) was conducted an empirical study about critical thinking in the English writing of 45 undergraduate English Students…… 9 students in Japan. Based on the result of research, he found that students delivered a higher quality and better understanding on investigating the issue in aspects of arguments, fallacies, evidence, and recognition of opposing viewpoints. Another study on expressing deeper level of though in writing was carried out by Indah and Kusuma (2016) at undergraduate student majoring in English. There were 130 students participating on that research. Indah and Kusuma (2016) showed the result of student’s level of critical thinking around 45% elementary, 20% pre-intermediate, 20% intermediate, 10% post-intermediate and 5% advanced. Based on the calculation, most students fall in the scale of pre-intermediate. Pedagogical practice is another factor which has the correlation with previous paragraphs about cultural background. Ng (2001) wrote in his book “Why Asian are Less Creative than Westerners” explained that the difficulties of Asian students having higher order of thinking because of passive education is embedded with the culture. Mostly children are raising in Asian Culture asked to be obey toward their parents or relatives rather than explore their self-expression. In contrast, Western society is more tolerant toward children’s self-expression, and it is commonly practiced among society. Richmond (2017) revealed that the freedom of self-expression gives children more space to explore and accept their thought and emotions which lead to the process of critical thinking development. Therefore, the rote learning method is mostly used because of passive nature education. Students tend to be passive recipient and consider teacher as the center of knowledge. Teachers need to encourage students to actively participate in class such speaking class; otherwise they act to be quite and passive. Even though, there are increasing number of awareness to promo higher cognitive skills programs in Asian countries such student- centered learning at school and university. However, there is still found lack of awareness in pedagogical practice. Ratnadewi and Yunianti (2019) conducted the research on Indonesia students teachers majoring English about critical thinking skills text analysis. Based on the research. Ratnadewi and Yunianti (2019) found that 75% of students have low achievement in reflection as part of cognitive thinking skill to observe their analysis. Desty… 10 Furthermore, In the field of educator teaching English to speaker of other languages, some of them prefer to be more focus on methodologies and pedagogical trends such immersion, CLIL, grammar translation to audiolingualism than talking about critical thinking skill. According to (2010) said that lacking discussion on critical thinking might be related to strengthen their critical thinking into their lesson and pedagogical practice. Regarding these challenges of cultural background and teaching practice to the level of students’ higher order thinking skill, this research is conducted to analyzing English student’s perception on critical thinking pedagogical method. This research is relevant to the current condition where there is gap of pedagogical method and lack awareness of teaching practice. This research navigates English student because they will become part of English educator as the facilitator of Learning. The result of this research is used to navigate and develop methodological English students in learning and teaching critical thinking skills. RESEARCH METHOD The design of this research was quantitative research design to know analyzing English student’s perception on critical thinking pedagogical method. Gay ,Mills and Airasian (2009) explains that survey design was procedure on collecting the data in quantitative research in which the investigators take to the entire population or a sample of concerns, practices, preferences, attitudes, or interest of a group of people. The researcher collected the data by using questionnaires and analyzed the data to explain the answer of hypothesis or questions. This research was conducted on the November last year by taking sample from English education students of Universitas International Batam. The participants of this research was taken from third, fifth and seventh semester who already passed the basic knowledge of English language teaching. The numbers of participants were 25 students. Due to COVID-19, the questioners were given through online by sharing the link of question form (google form). There was eight 10 questions given The questionnaires English Students…… 11 type was using scale Likert 1-5 which 1 means strongly disagree, 2 means agree, 3 means neutral, 4 means disagree, and 5 means strongly agree. The result of study was seen from the percentage each of component chosen by participants. FINDINGS AND DISCUSSION The research was done in the last of December receiving 25 participants started from third semester until seventh semesters. The type of questions was given students’ perceptions on critical thinking pedagogical techniques. Based on the result of research, the number of participants consisted of 32% female and 68% male. Then, the range of semester from participants were 64% from third semester, 32% fifth semester and the rest were from seventh semester students. There were eight statements were given on the research. This paragraph talked about the finding first and followed by the discussion on the finding by researchers. The first statement was asking about the importance of critical thinking skill as soft skill, there were 68% strongly, 28 agree and 4% agree. The second statement was asking if critical thinking needs to be developed during teaching and learning process. Based on the statement, there 56% strongly agreed, 32% agree and the rest around 12 % neutral. Third statement asked about critical thinking could be developed by putting students in groups to solve problems, discuss answers and apply information to the particular situation, then 44 % participants were strongly agree with statements, 48% agree and 8% neutral. The fourth statement was about reflective thought activities develop students' critical thinking. Based on fourth statements, there were 64% choose strongly to agree, 12% agree, 20% neutral, and 4% disagree. Then, the result of questions from number five until eight are showed in this paragraph. The fifth statant was asked about encouraging students to "think out loud" when answering develop critical thinking. There were 36% students strongly agree with this statement, 44% agree, 16% neutral and 4% disagree. Then, the sixth questions asked if asking questions from simple to factual recall to more analysis and synthesis help to build students' critical thinking. Based on that statement, there were 44% strongly agree, 48% Desty… 12 agree, and 8% neutral. Then, the following statement was about modeling contextual example when discussing content material support students critical thinking skills, then around 44% students were strongly agreed, 44% agree and 12% neutral. The last statement about evaluates student learning by allowing students to provide a real-life example construct critical thinking skill, then 56% strongly agree, 32% agree, 8% neutral dan 4% disagree. Based on the following question was given about critical thinking to the participants, we can conclude mostly students agree if critical thinking is important soft skill to be possessed. Then, there was none of them voted strongly to disagree with the statements. However, there were around 1% disagree with critical thinking pedagogical techniques. Even the number of students disagree was very low, it needs further evaluation and follow up about student’s point of on reflective thought and think out loud activities, then giving example on real life didn’t promote students to think critically. The disagreement of students with kind of self-regulating activities. Then, it could be seen correlation to result of previous paragraph from Ratnadewi and Yunianti (2019) about students’ teachers result of text analysis has lower achievement in reflective thought. Beaumont, J. (2010) explained that reflective though activities lead to the process of higher order of thinking because it acts ourselves to control the respond and quick judgement. Furthermore, the mean of participants strongly agreed with whole statements of pedagogical method in critical thinking were 51%. The rest of population around 36% agreed with statements. It means if students comprehension on teaching methods which can promotes students to think critically. CONCLUSION After conducting the research about English students’ perception on critical thinking pedagogical methods, the researcher found that some students already understood about teaching activities to promote students critical thinking such group problems solving discussion, reflection activities, think and loud activities, the type of questions asking English Students…… 13 about analyses and synthesis, model contextual activities, and provide life examples. However, some students have lack understanding in the part of pedagogical techniques about reflective teaching method. As expert in educational teaching believe, if reflection technique are able to develop students ‘critical thinking aspects. This data is early research, so the research could be expanded to further research development in critical thinking and on how students ‘teachers implement and use those critical thinking pedagogical methods. REFERENCES Ab Kadir, M. A. (2017). What teacher knowledge matters in effectively developing critical thinkers in the 21 st century curriculum?. Thinking Skills and Creativity, 23, 79-90. Atkinson, D., & Ramanathan, V. (1995). Cultures of writing: An ethnographic comparison of L1 and L2 university writing/language programs. TESOL quarterly, 29(3), 539- 568. https://doi.org/10.2307/3587975. Beaumont, J. (2010). A sequence of critical thinking tasks. Tesol Journal, 1(4), 427-448. https://doi.org/10.5054/tj.2010.234763. Ennis, R. H. (2011). 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