Enhancing critical thinking to foster students’ analytical capacity in academic writing

The current qualitative study aimed at fostering critical thinking skills in students and enhancing their analytical capacity, leading them to generate critical academic writing. An open-ended questionnaire dealing with lecturers’ expertise and experiences in teaching writing and the role of their critical thinking skills in writing itself was administered to eight lecturers with expertise in teaching writing. The obtained data were submitted to manual coding, and the findings showed that fostering critical thinking in student writers should follow a stepwise process, whereby they learn to (a) interpret, (b) analyze, (c) synthesize, (d) evaluate, and (e) reflect. It was concluded that problem-based learning is the optimal approach to enhance critical thinking among student writers of academic texts.