THE DEVELOPMENT OF ENGLISH CRITICAL READING ABILITY THROUGH CHILDREN’S LITERATURE USING THE CONTENT AND LANGUAGE INTEGRATED LEARNING (CLIL) APPROACH FOR SECOND-YEAR ENGLISH PRE-SERVICE TEACHERS

Abstract

This study aimed to 1) compare students’ critical English reading ability before and after being taught through the Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) approach, and 2) examine students' satisfaction by using the Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) approach. The population comprised 60 second-year English majors from the Faculty of Education, Pibulsongkram Rajabhat University. Purposive sampling was employed to select 30 students as the sample. The research instruments included: 1) lesson plans for the course EDUC351 Learning Management for Thinking Skill Development through Children’s Literature, which were evaluated at a high level of appropriateness ( = 4.72, SD = 0.38); 2) a critical English reading ability test with item–objective congruence indices ranging from 0.67 to 1.00, difficulty indices (p) between 0.50–0.80, discrimination indices (r) between 0.30–0.83, and a reliability coefficient (KR-20) of 0.82; and 3) a satisfaction questionnaire on Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) with a Cronbach’s alpha coefficient of 0.87. The intervention lasted six weeks, totaling 12 instructional hours. Data were analyzed using mean, standard deviation, and a t-test.

The research findings revealed that 1) students’ critical English reading ability significantly improved after learning through the CLIL approach at the .05 level of significance and 2) students reported a high level of satisfaction with the CLIL-based learning approach ( = 4.79, SD = 0.27).