Abstract

This study aimed to investigate the effect of critical literacy-based literature reading on first-year students’ critical thinking skills. For this purpose, twelve learning sessions were attended by thirty-six first-year students, ages 16 to 18, from the Department of Indonesian Language and Literature Teaching, Indonesia. After passing the Indonesian Language Competency Test (UKBI), they were chosen, and their results, which ranged from 75 to 79.9 percent, were quite high. The selection of participants was done via non-random sampling. This study’s quasi-experimental pretest–posttest control group design. Half the students were taught through critical literacy-based literature reading (experimental group). The other half were taught conventional learning methods (control group). Data collection was carried out after practicing critical literacy-based literature reading. Data were obtained from the pretest and posttest activities in the control and experimental groups using the critical thinking test sheet developed from the Facione and Gittens model. SPSS for Windows version 25 was used for data analysis. The study’s findings show that the experimental group outperformed the control group in terms of score. This means that critical literacy-based literature reading has a significant effect on the critical thinking skills of first-year students. The findings of this research show that the process of critical literacy-based literature reading can develop students’ critical awareness and critical thinking skills in facing all forms of reality that represent dominance, abuse of power, oppression, injustice, social marginalization, ethnic issues, racial issues, and all systems that shackle them contained in literary texts and real life. Future research may be able to compare the findings of this study in terms of cognitive abilities, various educational backgrounds, literary text reading habits, and gender.