Effectiveness of Critical Thinking Skills for English Literature Study with Reader Response Theory: Review of Literature

Abstract

Since Socrates' time, reasoning is considered valuable for the justification of speaker's belief along with Thomas Aquinas' testing of his thinking to answer his own thinking. Critical thinking has been part of discussion among the educators for its significance and application for last many decades. Many educators have conducted researches on the assessment of critical thinking within a domain or across the domain in order to test students' critical thinking skills and its effect on their learning. Similarly, critical thinking is highly valuable for the study of literature as it explicitly asked for learners' beliefs, perceptions, and judgments in order to remove the ambiguity of thought. Perfection of thought can be achieved with the use of critical thinking skills while training of mind needs interaction between literary text and the reader as literature has the capacity to achieve mental traits specified to critical thinking. Accordingly, this report presents a relationship between critical thinking skills and English literature study along with reader response theory techniques considering that without the use of critical thinking skills and reader response theory, study of literature is haphazard hence for the application of reader response theory, literary text is inevitable. In essence, I aim to highlight the effectiveness of critical thinking skills for the study of literature while emphasizing the significance of reader response theory which is also inevitable for the study of literature and for the use of critical thinking skills. IntroductionAdvocates of critical thinking take critical thinking as a main component of students' learning and think that critical thinking must be part of education and students must be trained in critical thinking (Dewey, Scriven, 1985). The present scenario highly demands that learners must be critical in order to make rational decisions. Moreover, Russell's (1960) equation of thinking comprising attitude + knowledge + thinking skills (cited in Halpern, 2013) makes it pertinent to study students' response towards any text regarding their background knowledge with the use of critical thinking skills.The significance of this report is to highlight the effectiveness of critical thinking from students' perspectives that how critical thinking is essential for students' learning. This report is an attempt to justify that the how the effective use of critical thinking skills enhances students' literature study with reader response theory techniques. This study helps in opening new vistas for the readers especially novice learners of literature that how different critical thinking skills would facilitate them for the study of literature along with reader response theory techniques. Particularly, the significance of this study unveils the reality that there exists a relationship between critical thinking, English literature with the application of reader response theory however ignoring this relationship; neither the objectives of critical thinking skills can be achieve...

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