Abstract

Taiwan’s test-oriented educational system has failed to teach students how to reflect on their thoughts through academic activities. This study used surveys to investigate the effects of teacher-focused versus student-focused instructional patterns on the development of students’ critical thinking skills. Another purpose was to see whether or not instructional patterns and critical thinking could predict students’ reading comprehension. A total of twelve English teachers and 341 first-year junior college students in Taiwan participated in the study. Findings revealed that student-focused instructions significantly predicted students’ critical thinking skills. It also revealed that students who had better critical thinking performed better in English reading comprehension. For individual critical thinking, the higher inference, deduction, and evaluation students had, the better their reading comprehension students performed.