Critical thinking (CT) skill in reading class

Critical thinking (CT) skill is one of the important skills for the 21st century. According to Vdovina (2013), Critical thinking is associated with thinking quality and, if sufficiently developed, provides learners with a more skillful way of communicating with other people, acquiring new knowledge, and dealing with ideas, beliefs, and attitudes. According to Fahim and Aghaalikhani (2014), by utilizing critical thinking skills, students can use the intellectual tools that critical thinking offers – concepts and principles that enable them to analyze, assess, and improve thinking. They will be able to work diligently to develop the intellectual virtues of intellectual integrity, intellectual humility, intellectual civility, intellectual empathy, intellectual sense of justice and confidence in reason. Fahim and Aghaalikhani (2014) further state that in order to maximize the teaching of critical thinking, critical thinking should be integrated into the process of English Language Teaching (ELT), specifically, in reading skill. Since the teachers are those who are responsible for making the students successful in the classroom, they need to know critical thinking skill. Therefore, this paper aims at sharing ideas about the designs of questions in enhancing critical thinking using Bloom’s taxonomy and Socratic questions (Paul’s taxonomy of Socratic questions)