Triggering Students' Critical Thinking Through Literary Analysis

Abstract

Critical thinking skill is a must have skill and needs to be developed for students. Through literary analysis, students can obtain critical thinking skills. Literature is a branch of art that undergoes a growth process in line with the passage of time and the development of people's minds. Students will practice expressing opinions, concluding, explaining cause-and-effect relationships, comparing facts, and applying the ideas they have gained from literature to new situations. This study is to figure out whether the process of literary analysis teaching and learning triggers students’ critical thinking skills. Students of the English Language Education Study Program batch 2018 that have taken literary analysis classes are the subjects observed and asked about classroom reflection based on critical thinking indicators. The research findings showed that the implementation of literary analysis learning in the classroom through observation sheets has been going well. It found that students conduct 80% of the critical thinking skills indicators. In addition, analyzing literary works can trigger students to think critically to the level of HOTS (High Order Thinking Skills) because students have entered stage 6 in the critical thinking sequence, namely "Creating," which results in an analysis paper.