A narrative inquiry of learners' critical thinking skills in reading comprehension : learning forward

A reading habit was developed since I was a little girl, that thing happened when I perceived reading book as a child and became my routine as a ‘bedtime’ story. Since then, every particular moment was memorable and brought me to my self-talk on the students’ interest in reading and led to a certain curiosity “why students encounter difficulties in reading comprehension” and that indirectly affect their critical thinking skills as well. Having the personal recall on reading in varied educational levels, pursue me to do research that falls within the three research questions; 1) what factors hinder students in reading comprehension? 2) what are the benefits of critical thinking skills in reading comprehension? and 3) how do students perceive themselves as critical thinkers? To write the research, a narrative inquiry method is used as a platform to retell authentic learners’ experience in applying critical thinking in reading comprehension, with a questionnaire and two interview sessions. Some enhancement through the thesis writing is also equipped with previous studies, which relate to the two key terms; critical thinking and reading comprehension. As a result, personal factors are found as the critical events during the interview session and answers that lack of vocabulary in long passages and lack of opportunities to share opinion contributes to the factors that hinder students in understanding reading comprehension. The answer is varied for each participant, while some participants recognized their development of analytical skills and ability to understand the key information, propose new ideas, inference key conclusions, and understand the authors’ point of view as one of the 8 criteria of critical thinker in reading. The last research question of how students perceived themselves as critical thinker are divided into two; critical thinker in general and critical thinker in reading, which shows one’s aptitude to be open-minded to new possibilities is essential and apprehending new vocabularies as well as analytical skills is important to comprehend a passage as critical thinker in reading. While critical thinker in general varied from each participant; Participant A states an ability to be open to discussion, Participant B linked critical thinker to Bloom Taxonomy, and Participant C believed that an individual should equip with good amount of reading to practice analytical skills