Innovation in Language Learning

Critical thinking skills are needed to be developed urgently among Thai students under the Thailand 4.0 development policy whose aims are to create prosperity, security, and sustainability in the society. This awareness enables scholars to vision a need to integrate the application of online learning into the EFL teaching as a means to help develop and reinforce Thai Gen Z learners’ critical thinking ability. Thus, this experimental research was aimed to: 1) create the basic online literary reading lessons; 2) compare students’ critical thinking ability before and after using these lessons; and 3) examine students’ opinions and attitude toward employing online lessons to create their critical thinking skills. The 140 first-year Arts students at Silpakorn University in the academic year 2017 were randomly selected as sample in this experiment. The duration of this experiment was a 15-day practice period. The research instruments included 1) the created online lessons accessed via the Moodle platform; 2) paper-based pretests and online posttests on Moodle; 3) profile and post questionnaires; and 4) semi-structured interview. Percentage, mean, standard deviation, and dependent t-test were used in the data analysis. The results of the research show that the students’ critical reading ability was considerably higher at the 0.05 significance level after using these online lessons. The students also expressed highly positive opinions and attitude toward learning English via online lessons. 

Keywords: Online Learning, Online Lessons, Moodle, Critical Reading Skills;