Developing the Critical Thinking in University Students while Teaching them Methodological Reading Comprehension

Abstract

Critical thinking can be developed as part of reading comprehension. This study involved 57 university students from the Pacific National University. They worked with methodological texts to determine the topic, write a secondary text, create a cinquain, formulate hypotheses, and project the new material onto their own academic experience. The article introduces a new subjective approach to teaching text comprehension to university students. The approach is based on psychological foundations and the interaction between teaching staff and students. It develops the ability to generate new meaning and relations, as well as to classify various phenomena. The article also reveals the ways of understanding a text as a sign complex and offers some new diagnostic methods that treat text comprehension both as a process and a result. The authors also identified empirical indicators to control the dynamics of comprehension development. The experiment showed positive dynamics in the critical thinking skills of students who practiced reading comprehension based on methodological texts.