An investigation of effect of critical thinking skills on reading comprehension of literary Arabic texts among Iranian Language and Literature Arabic students

Reading comprehension skill is one of the fundamental and basic skill for understanding meanings and ideas available in the text. Attention to this skill especially for literary texts is one of the most important issues in the realm of language teaching. Using the right instruction methods for illuminating literary texts can confidently improve reading skills and reading comprehension of the students. Teaching reading comprehension texts based on critical thinking skills not only meets all the goals of literary texts, but also helps to improve the students’ reading comprehension. The aim of the current study is to investigate the effect of critical thinking skills on reading comprehension of Arabic literary texts among BA students of Arabic Language and Literature. The sample of the study consisted of 64 junior students of Arabic Language and Literature who were divided into two experimental and control groups. The experimental group was instructed based on critical thinking skills and the control group was instructed based on classical/traditional methods of teaching a text. The findings indicated that there is a significant difference between the performances of the groups and that critical thinking skills affects students’ reading comprehension skills.
The methodology for conducting this study followed a quasi- experimental design. The population of the study was all bachelor Arabic language and literature students of Iranian universities, among which 64 junior students of Shahid Beheshti and Yazd Universities were chosen as the experimental and control groups respectively.
The results showed that there is a significant relation between the incorporation of critical thinking skills in teaching Arabic literary text and an increase in the students’ comprehension. This means that using the sub-skills of the skills” inference, recognition of assumptions, interpretation, evaluating the arguments and deduction” which were covered in the literature can lead to increasing the students’ comprehension.