Understanding the facilitation of critical thinking in English as an Additional Language (EAL) by investigating the perceptions of five Indonesian senior high school teachers: An Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis

Critical thinking has long been considered as the educational goal in Indonesian English as an Additional Language (EAL) senior high school curriculum. However, the implementation tends to not be prioritised because standardised tests still play a pivotal role in assessing student outcomes. Teachers thus rely on textbooks to conduct the pedagogical practices to obtain better results in the standardised tests. Moreover, a lack of acknowledgement of critical thinking is caused by unclear objectives in the curriculum. This research investigates five EAL teachers’ reported perceptions of facilitating critical thinking in an Indonesian senior high school through in-depth semi-structured interviews. Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) of participant interviews yielded understanding about their views of requiring professional development, having a lack of support both from the target senior high school and government and dealing with the constraints of facilitating critical thinking in EAL. The findings also revealed that the concept of critical thinking was unclear to participants, and so they claimed that there should be critical thinking-based professional development workshops that provided them with findings from published research and authentic and meaningful teaching resources. The author concludes that more studies are recommended to holistically investigate in-depth practices to promote criticality in EAL curriculum development and solve the challenges.

Keywords: Critical Thinking, English as an Additional Language (EAL), Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA), Teacher Perceptions