Outside the Classroom Thinking Inside the Classroom Walls: Enhancing Students’ Critical Thinking Through Reading Literary Texts

AbstractDeveloping critical thinking is one of the crucial objectives of university education worldwide. However, current research in the field suggests that university students in different countries of the world lack the ability to read in-between the lines and to think critically. Therefore, developing critical thinking skills in university students is of major concern in contemporary educational research. The following paper discusses the question of how to enhance students’ critical thinking through reading a literary text as it is in the essence of a literary text to challenge the critical thinking of the reader who, by means of differentiating between the denotative and the connotative meaning, finding correlations between specific events of the plot, identifying the tone of the text, etc. practices crucial critical thinking skills such as problem solving, decision making, interpretation, logical reasoning, and metacognition with the aim to uncover the message hidden between the lines. The present paper illustrates some specific strategies of practicing critical thinking which were employed in an American Literature Course. The paper suggests that because a literary text could be considered a reflection of the real, “outside-the-classroom” world, it can be an effective means of how to prepare students “inside the classroom walls” for outside the classroom thinking