Name : Sari Berlianti

Student’s Number : A1B217009

How is literature, taking a part in developing critical thinking?

Nowadays, the topic of quality education is widely discussed by many people. Each person has a
different opinion about what quality education means. According to Masum Billah (2017) stated
that quality education means teaching not just facts, but how to determine those facts. It involves
critical thinking, learning to work with others and work independently. So quality education does
not necessarily mean just to score higher grades in public examinations. When a student fails to
acquire the social skills but obtains a high grade in the examination it does not talk about quality
education. So how can we achieve quality education where students are expected to be able to
think critically? Does applying literature in classroom can make students think critically?

Critical thinking ability can be used for almost all aspect of life , it is include the use of critical
thinking in education where students should be able to make correct judgment on something in
learning context and also individuals’ daily life where they need to make short kind of choice for
various aspect in their life. Literary text can be useful to enhance students’ critical thinking
because the activity that is usually conducted is analyzing some literary text such as poetry,
story, novels, and others. Literary text like poetry always has meaning beyond the surface of the
poem itself. Thus, it requires students’ ability to make judgment on what kind of purpose that the
writer tried intended to deliver through the poem itself. The delivery of student judgment itself
requires logical reasoning which supported by evidence. Thus, it will be very effective to
enhance students’ critical thinking by learning through literary work analysis.

Critical thinking as an activity which consist of high order thinking activity such as reflection,
inference, synthesizing information to make reasonable judgment as it literature reading involves
students’ ability to recall, retrieve, and reflect their prior knowledge in order to be able to judge
the literal or implied meaning, differentiate facts or opinion. Critical thinking is the fact that
literary work are closely related to life. The nature of literature is claimed to be directly related
with reality. However, one also stated that literature even has more powerful and significant role
in life because it may become the tool to criticize life. The use of critical thinking are also related
to the ability of individuals in making decision about their daily life matters. Thus, by analyzing
and studying literary text which consist of matter which directly reflect on daily life matters may
give reference to the students in taking up action since they have already stored a schemata about
particular matters by analyzing a literary text.

In conclusion, quality education can be achieved by applying the literary work in the classroom.
As we know that the aim quality of education is to make people to be able think critically.
Enhancing students critical thinking in EFL classroom context will be more interesting and
effective by teaching literature as the media to show students how to be critically respond to a
case and practicing some critical thinking activities through the reading and analyzing a literary
works.