Having critical thinking skills help to deepen a student’s comprehension of a text, resulting in a positive reading experience.
6. Descriptive text
Descriptive text is a text which has social purpose to give an account of imagined or factual events.
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Hyland explains more about description that it tends to use present tense and description makes use of “be” and “have”.
There are three steps within a descriptive text; a.
İdentification: has purpose to define, to classify or generalize about phenomenon. b.
Aspect: has purpose to describe atributes of each category of the phenomenon. c.
Conclusion: has purpose to sum up the description. Harwell and Dorill state that the purpose of description is tos hare sense
impressions and to record thought and feelings stimulated by those impressions, in other words, they are both an objective relaying of sense data and a subjective
interpretation of that data. Furthemore, he
continues that a descriptive paraghraph share its writer’s sense impressions. This method, relying heavily on visual details, begins by
establishing the perspective from which something is seen and then guides a reader’s eyes from this point to the other points.
C. Relevant Previous Studies
Many studies have been conducted to study about critical thinking in the ESL and EFL learning area in Indonesia and other countries. Many of them
investigated about the correlation between critical thinking ability and language proficiency as well as in reading proficiency. This part will refer to some of them:
The first research was conducted by Isik, H., which entitles The Relationship between Critical Thinking and Language Proficiency of Turkish
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Ken Hyland, Genre and Second Language Writing, Michigan: The University Language Press, p. 34.
Anadolu University. The study was conducted to find out the critical thinking ability of Malaysian undergraduates and its relationship with their language
proficiency. It was conducted in university utara Turkey of which total participants were 280 undergraduates taken from the university. The instruments
used in the study were demographic questionnaire and test. The demographic questionnaire was intended to gain and to collect the undergradu
ates’ language proficiency data encompassing speaking, reading, writing and grammar; whereas,
the test was conducted to find out the undergraduates’ critical thinking ability. Based on the finding of this research, it was found that there was a significant
correlation between undergraduates’ critical thinking ability and their language proficiency.
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The next research was conducted by Ahmad Sugianto, entitles The Relationship between Critical Thinking Ability and Writing Ability, A
Correlational Study of the Sixth Semester Students of State Islamic University, Jakarta. This research was conducted in State Islamic University, Jakarta-
Indonesia. 60 students from the sixth semester of English Education Department participated in this study. This study aimed to find out whether or not there is any
significance relationship between critical thinking ability and writing ability. The study used correlational design which carried out two kinds of instruments, they
are; Critical Thinking test and writing test. The data was analyzed using Pearson Product Moment correlation which the research finding showed that there is a
significant correlation between students’ critical thinking ability and the writing ability of the students of English education department of UIN Jakarta
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. In comparison with the previous related studies above, this study has some
similarity since it has the same independent variable critical thinking ability.
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Isik, H., 2010. High School Students’ Critical Reading Levels and the Relationship between Critical Reading Level and Critical Thinking Dispositions and Proficiency. Unpublished
Master’s thesis, Anadolu University, Turkey.
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Ahmad Sugianto 2014. “The Relationship between Critical Thinking and Writing Ability, A Correlational Study of the Sixth Semester Students of State Islamic University,
Jakarta.”
However; there are some differences among each other. This study is more specific and detail than other investigations conducted by other researchers. The
first research above investigated whether or not critical thinking had relationship with language proficiency; while this research focused on investigating the
correlation between critical thinking and reading comprehension skills. Therefore,
this research is really new and different from the other research.
D. Conceptual Framework
Reading comprehension involves the ability to not only read the words but also the abstract meaning behind the text. However, the ability to understand the
abstract meaning behind the texts involves higher order thinking. Higher-order thinking skills enable students to do this and find the real value in the information
they are reading. Readers who can use higher order thinking not only show knowledge and understanding of the text, they can put the information in new
contexts and form relations between ideas. Some experts see reading as a decoding process with the reader processing
each letter in turn, producing the appropriate sounds, and forming words. Allington, R., Sirange M., 1980. In other definition, reading is the process of
construction meaning from read book.
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Therefore, reading is a comprehension process, and comprehension is the ability to construct the author’s message
through experiential background, knowledge, language, and thinking skills. The role of critical thinking is indispensable in reading comprehension.
The relationship between those skills seems to be equal and parallel. It means that if the readers have good critical thinking skill, they are supposed to have good
ability in comprehending the texts. Meanwhile, if the writers lack of the ability to think critically, they are supposed to have poor reading comprehension skill.
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Allington, R.
Strange, M.
2001 What is Reading?
3thd.Ed; Learning Through Reading, p.15
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