CAR - 8

Citation: Correia, Rosane. (2006). Encouraging critical reading in the EFL classroom, English teaching forum, 1(1): 16-20.

The main purpose of this study is to make alternative possibilities for reading activities which can make the students become more interested in the reading activity and also become more active and being a critical reader.

The problem behind this study is most of the reading activity in the classroom is passive reading. The example is the students must respond the multiple choice exercise, vocabulary, true-false statements, and so on. Those activities did not require the students to read the text deeply. They just read the text to find the correct answers of the exercise.

Based on the problem, the researcher provides active reading activity, that is critical reading. that activity can make the students think beyond the text. The final product of critical reading is making a summary, where the students can think out of the text to make the summary. Before making a summary there are some activities which must be done by the students in reading activity. Those are pre-reading activity, while-reading tasks, and the last is post-reading tasks. In the reading activity, the researcher using authentic material that is newspaper. After those three activities done, the researcher asks the students to make a summary in pairs and after that, they must exchange their summary with their classmate.

Although, conducting critical reading is need more time and difficult, but at the end, it shows the good result for the students. Not only in the students' reading comprehension but also in the students' motivation in joining the reading class.