THE APPLICATION OF CRITICAL READING IN READING LOGS ASSIGNMENT AS PERCEIVED BY FRESHMEN OF THE FAST-TRACK DIVISION, FELTE, ULIS, VNU =

Abstract

Infobesity – Information obesity, which means information overload, reflects exactly what people are experiencing in this era of technologies. With technological advancements, people become indecisive when reading different writings written by different people with different viewpoints but about the same issue. Gradually, people’s critical mind gets eroded with the words they read. Being aware of the information trap, it is of the utmost importance for freshmen in the Fast-track program of Faculty of English Language Teacher Education (FELTE) – University of Languages and International Studies (ULIS) to avoid being baited by developing critical reading proficiency. With an aim to foster and improve students’ critical reading proficiency, the Reading Logs assignment has been introduced to these freshmen in their very first semester. In this paper, the researcher aims to investigate into the application of critical reading skills during the process of doing Reading Logs as well as the critical reading proficiency achieved by students after their completing the Reading Logs assignment. To achieve the target, a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods was adopted for data collection and analysis. Both questionnaires and interviews were utilized to collect quantitative and qualitative data, which then would be analyzed by statistical and thematic data analytic techniques. Based on the framework proposed by Li (2010), the results reveal that students could exploit skills of different levels namely approaching skills, analyzing skills, meaning discovering skills, and evaluating skills. Moreover, after the Reading Logs assignment, they could achieve a certain level of critical reading proficiency. However, there still existed gaps to improve in order to reinforce students’ critical reading proficiency through this assignment. In this research, some suggestions would also be offered for the betterment of the assignment