Critical Reading: Students’ Problems, Strategies, and Reflections

Critical reading has been considered as the highest level of reading behavior for English Department students. Students are expected to be able to critically read both non-fiction and fiction texts. This situation, for sure, has made EFL students face lot of problems. This study is intended to reveal students’ problems, strategies, and reflections on critical reading. Revealing those three points becomes an academic effort to add knowledge about critical reading in the EFL reading comprehension course context. This study is approached through a descriptive qualitative research design which primarily focuses on students’ written responses on open-ended questionnaire and interview. The EFL students who join in Reading Comprehension III were asked to give written responses based on statement starters. Then, by purposefully selecting students, they were interviewed to gain more information on their reflection. The findings reveal that students have both linguistic and non-linguistic problems in doing critical reading. The strategies they used cover both reading skill and non-reading skill strategies. The students reflect that reading III course has helped them to sharpen critical reading skill in terms of text analysis, summary writing, and questions development activities. It is suggested to engage students with more activities to evaluate and to develop questions. For further research, exploring effective strategies to read critically is highly recommended.