From Book to Screen: Adopting Cinematic Adaptations of Literature in the EFL Classroom to Hone Students’ Critical Thinking Skills

ABSTRACT

In light of the paramount value placed on critical thinking (CT) in higher education and the scarcity of research into the use of cinematic adaptations to this end, this study investigated the incorporation of film into the source literature to hone students’ cognitive skills in the areas of analysis, inference, evaluation, induction, and deduction. Participants were 50 third-year students of English as a foreign language (EFL) enrolled in a university in eastern Algeria for academic year 2015–2016. During the fall semester, the treatment group (n = 24) and the control group (n = 26) took a regular literature course. In the spring semester, the treatment group took a film-literature course and the control group, a reading-only course that drew on Facione's IDEAS critical thinking model. The California Critical Thinking Skills Test (CCTST) was used as a pretest and posttest. Empirical findings indicated that both groups performed on par in all cognitive areas of CT with the exception of inference, wherein the film group outperformed the reading-only group in this dimension.

KEYWORDS:

• Cognitive skills
• source literature
• film adaptations
• IDEAS critical thinking model
• EFL classroom

Acknowledgements

Special thanks to Dr. Ken Habib for his editing of the manuscript and Dr. Peter Facione for his valuable comments on part of the literature review and for answering all my queries on the concept of critical thinking. I am deeply indebted to all students who kindly accepted to take part in this study.