Critical thinking skills are one of the most soughed after criteria for studies and work in the 21st century, impacted by the industrial revolution that revamped the nature of the job, lifestyle and education. Critical thinking skills develop through the process of critical reading which involves the high order thinking, are lacking among the graduates, contributing to the statistic of unemployment in the nation. The past studies revealed the tertiary students’ critical reading skills do not surpass the comprehension level and need for critical reading in English text training. Critical reading skills can be instilled in the tertiary students through continuous practice. In addressing to this problem, a mobile phone application is developed as practising tool, with practice module divided into themes with different levels of difficulties. The purpose of this paper is to meet the need to enhance the critical reading skills of the pre university program students in Samarahan District, Sarawak, Malaysia via purposing the use of ReadMe mobile application as effective language practising tool. The research methodology employed the quantitative approach and data was collected via survey questionnaire with quasi experimental approach involved the administration of pretest, post test and document analysis. It was found that half of the respondents showed improvement in the critical reading competency thus enhanced their interest in reading.
Critical thinking is essential life skills in the 21st century to achieve success at work or school (Greiff, Niepel, & Wüstenberg, 2015) and the deficiency to think critically among fresh graduates (Azmi, Hashim, & Yusoff, 2018) served as impetus to conduct study on the root of the problem related to the development of critical thinking. Critical thinking is inextricably linked to critical reading because critical thinking occurred if the text is critically understood through critical reading (Kurland, 2000; Handayani, 2018). Thus critical reading skills should be emphasized in the teaching and learning process of reading.
Critical reading skills enable the student to analyze, synthesize and evaluate information in the text and increase the students’ capability in expressing their own view and opinions (Norbaiyah, Roose, Farah, & Juhaida, 2014) and the information comes from variety of sources. The rise of the smart machine, systems and globally connected world with gradual shifting from printed materials to digital materials and demand for digital literacy includes the need to read critically over massive information (Silvhiany, 2019) demand the efficiency used of critical reading skills at tertiary education level and in school. ESL learners with low critical reading skills suffered comprehension exhaustion due to exposure to wide range of unfamiliar vocabulary and information from the use of technology (Norbaiyah et al., 2014) resulting in the learners to consume the information passively (Silvhianny, 2019).
In view of the critical reading level of the nation, critical reading skills are insufficient acquired by the students. Many past studies revealed the tertiary students do not surpass the comprehension level and are lacking critical reading skills (Mohd Zin, Wong, & Rafik-Galae, 2014; Zainal & Seng, 2017) and there is need for training to employ the critical reading skills for English text (Sarjit & Gurnam, 2014). In addition, Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2018 organized by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) reported the students aged 15 years old in the nation, possessed reading skills below the average standard set by OECD, with diminutive use of critical reading skills (OECD, 2018).
In regards to the critical reading of the tertiary students, it is crucial to address the acquisition of critical reading skills of pre university students who are preparing for admission to degree program in the universities. The inclusion of English language subject at the pre university programme is to prepare the students for the Malaysian University English Test, which is one of the requirements for admission to the degree level. The test emphasized on the reading, writing, listening and speaking skills, and reading has the highest mark weightage. The students in one of the school in the Samarahan District of Sarawak, Malaysia are struggling to surpass the average passing mark, with majority landing in Band 2 for reading test. It is learnt that the students depended on the critical reading practice in the classroom and no responsibility was given to the students to acquire the skills independently resulting in no retention of these cognitive skills for future use. Therefore intervention is required to improve the acquisition of the critical reading skills with integration of mobile technology parallel to the style of learning in the 21st century. The aim of this study is to enhance critical reading skills of pre university students in suburban schools in Sarawak, Malaysia via proposing the use of mobile phone application as effective language practicing tool and the research questions are as follow:
1) How does the mobile application improve the pre university ESL learners’ critical reading skills?
2) What are the ESL learners’ perceptions of the mobile phone application, as critical reading practising tool?
The acquisition of critical reading skills involved the understanding of critical reading skills, reading strategies and process of acquiring the critical reading skills (Norbaiyah et al., 2014). Critical reading skills are cognitive skills and to acquire these skills, Schunk (2010) posited that the process begins with obtaining the foundation or one piece principle of the knowledge or skills and proceed to the multiple principles or the complexity of the knowledge or skills and mastering through practice or training to achieve efficiency.
Critical reading with success, incurred the use of reading strategies. Hudson (2009) referred reading strategy as any interactive process with the purpose of grasping meaning from the connected text and reading skills function with the setting of such reading strategies. Axelrod and Cooper (1999), highlighted the important critical reading strategies are annotate, preview, contextualize, outline, analyzed option, summarize, paraphrasing, synthesize, questioning and reflecting because as a good reader, these strategies are effective for the reader to evaluate their own practices in the process of developing their own critical reading skills (Hall I. & Hall D., 2004).
The process of acquiring critical reading skills through practice involves the students using the available critical reading skills in different situation and students plan, monitor and evaluate their own acquisition of the skills parallel to the concept in the meta-cognition of regulation (Flavell, 1979), which involves the meta-cognitive activities that help to control one’s thinking on learning using three essential skills. In critical reading, the planning involves setting of goal, and recollection of the function of each critical reading skills which facilitates the choice of strategies needed to read and applying the critical reading skills. The monitoring activity refers to the awareness of comprehension and task performance where students test their own ability on new materials involving continuation of reinforcement, refining, and changing approaches to achieve success in reading. Evaluation entails the whole process by analyzing the mistakes and notion on the success based on the test result.
The acquisition of critical reading skills success depends on the construction of the knowledge of the skills in the students. The Cognitive Constructivism Theory by Piaget (1976) explained that construction of knowledge occurrs through experience which creates schema that changes, enlarged and made sophisticated through the process of assimilation and accommodation (Padesky, 1994). The assimilation process happens in the construction of knowledge or skills acquired cognitively by experiencing the practices in the constructive environment such as classroom. The application of the assimilated knowledge or skills, proceed with more practices of the knowledge or skills in different situations which puts the learner in the state of equilibrium (Mcleod, 2018). In the state of equilibrium at times, the learner experience disequilibrium and will accommodate to the situation with alternative strategies (Piaget, 1976). This theory is adopted in the Cognitive Constructivist Theory of Multimedia (Bull, 2009) incorporated in the development of the content for the mobile phone application adhere to the specification of interactive digital materials that listed: the content to be context based and accordance to objective of the lesson, encourage active involvement and engagement in learning, digital materials emphasize on students’ autonomy development and control over learning and personal growth, and learning outcomes should stimulate a perspective and an understanding.
Mobile Assisted Language Learning (MALL) replaced Computer Assisted Language Learning (Chung, Chen, & Kuo, 2015) due to the evolution of mobile technology proven to ease the deliverance of tasks for language learning and the development of English language from basic features of English instructions such as vocabulary (Wu, 2015), grammar (Ghani, Paris, Shah, Yussof, & Abbas, 2017) to writing (Kazem, 2015; Morshedi, 2019), listening (Kohzadi, Mohammadi, & Samadi, 2014) and reading (Hazaea & Alzubi, 2016) The mobile technologies in the Mobile Assisted Language Learning evolves the rise in the utilization of mobile technologies devices such as mobile phone, PDAs, iPad, MP3 and MP players. Mobile technologies for mobile phone evolved through times with continuous upgrading of features and ability to download many software applications (apps) attributing to meaningful use of this device in all aspects of the life of the users. The apps may be free or incur charges and developed for entertainment, gaming, businesses and education (Gangaiamaran & Pasupathi, 2017). The advantages of using mobile phone application in improving the ESL learners’ reading practice are highlighted in several past studies summaries, as allowing learning at own pace to practise independently with automated feedback (Sarvestani & Pishkar, 2015; McFadzien, 2015), enabled comprehension of more reading texts (Azli, Shah, & Mohamad, 2018), improve learners code breaking practices, text participation practice, text using and text analyzing practice (Handayani, 2018) that caused high motivation and interest among the students (Gangaiamaran & Pasuathi , 2017).
The ReadMe is an intervention tool that integrated learning and technology to facilitate students in enhancing their critical reading skills. Since the tool deals with technology, therefore the technology acceptance model (TAM) is adopted in the research. TAM is an information systems theory that models how users come to accept and use the technology. This model introduced by Davis (1989) as in
The research employed quantitative research design utilizing quasi-experimental method to test the effect of ReadMe on the students’ critical reading performance after the use of ReadMe application as dependent variable and students’ performance as independent variable involving the administration of pre test and post test to determine the students’ level of critical reading skills. The quantitative survey questionnaire is constructed to collect the respondents’ perceptions on the use and usefulness of mobile phone application as practising tool to improve their critical reading skills.
The population for this research estimated a total of 30 pre-university ESL students aged 19 years old from two different classes in the school at the suburban area of Samarahan District in Sarawak, Malaysia. The selection was based on convenient sampling of target group for the research (Dornyei, 2017). The samples are of mix English language proficiency based on their Sijil Pelajaran Malaysia (SPM) examination result as the result affirmed their actual proficiency level after 11 years of education. Convenience sampling is used in this study because the researchers intended to learn by discovering, understanding and gain insight focus of a sample (Merriam, 2009), and fulfilling the requirement which the researchers had determined for the study and served the research objectives of this study (Dornyei, 2017).
The demographic profile of the respondents in