Viewpoints on the Development of Critical Thinking Skills in the Process of Foreign Language Teaching in Higher Education and the Labor Market

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

I enjoyed reading your paper about critical thinking. Your literature review where you anchor the concept critical thinking historically is interesting, and gives the reader a solid fundament for the object of the paper: different groups' ideas of critical thinking in education. You describe the study's part in a both the bigger Erasmus study and the Lithuanian part of the study, i.e. a special focus on the focus groups. 

I would like to see a more thorough description of the different focus groups though. There a lot of acronyms to keep track of through the text, which makes the text a bit hard to read. I had to go back and forth between the Findings and the Methology in order to understand into which group of representatives the different groups should fall. Part of the problem is that the representatives for the "Labor market" also are educators or training to be educators. I would like to see some discussion about this. You do discuss this a bit in the Conclusion part, but I would like to see this earlier in the text, in order to make this clearer to the reader. The term Labor market indicates to me something else. It also has to to with the specific Lithuanian context and how the teacher education/training works. I would like to see a clearer description of the Lithuanian context somewhere in the paper. That would support the reading. You also write a bit of the Lithuanian history as being part of former Soviet union. You could probably do more of this, since this probably (as you indicate) has a big impact on the view of critical thinking. 

Also, it is sometimes hard to see a difference between Findings and discussion (and I am glad you put both under the same title). You could probably weave the two parts together even more, and not try to separate them as you do now. When you present the differences, you also present the findings.

You present very few earlier studies, which it hard for you to engage with other similar studies. To compensate for this, I would like to see a more comprehensive conclusion part with more engagement with the concept Critical thinking. 

Author Response

Thank you very much for the review. I sent the version revised according to your remarks to the editor two days ago, but I just received her message that I should reply to the reviewers and upload it to the system, so this is what I will try to do now.

Reviewer 2 Report

The manuscript investigated the Viewpoints on the Development of Critical Thinking Skills in 2 the Process of Foreign Language Teaching in Higher Education 3 and the Labor Market. This topic may be of interest to the readership of Education Sciences. However, there are many issues in every section of the paper.

Firstly, the introduction failed to highlight the importance of the current study. Secondly, the literature review did not sufficiently review the existing literature related to your research problems. There is a need to consider more recent literature on the topic to highlight the research gap for your study.

The research methods and research findings are not clear. Also, the findings need to be discussed in light of the current literature.

I hope these comments would be useful to your revisions. 

Author Response

Thank you very much for the review. I sent the version revised according to your remarks to the editor two days ago, but I just received her message that I should reply to the reviewers first and upload it to the system, so this is what I will try to do now.

Reviewer 3 Report

-          More recent and well-known literary resources would be needed in the theoretical introduction to Critical thinking (most of the 10 resources used are older – as mentioned, for example, in an overviewing monograph Mastering transversal competences in a higher education environment: through processes of critical thinking and reflection by D. Hanesová and L. Theodoulides, 2022).

-          Please, note earlier, that although you accomplished 3 research methods, you are using data only from one of them – focus groups.

-          The third research method  was used only by the first agent, VU, and not by the second one too – PPLC?

-          l. 203 – change of word order „How is CT taught at your university?”

-          l. 205-206 and 276: finish the sentence: Is self-evaluation, peer evaluation or 205 teacher evaluation?

-          l. 199-200, 205-206 – the question „ Do you believe there is a gap...“ is rather vague.. very subjective, did you ask the respondents for arguments? Or how did you want them to describe their „believing“?

-          l. 288 – Change the wording at the beginning of the sentence

I would expect more precised characterization of the difference between trainers and instructors, or even teachers involved in the research. Also it is not clear early enough in the study why the authors started to write about differences between VU and PLLC as earlier they wrote about differences between HEIs and LMOs ... Did you mean that the PLLC was a representative of all LMO? For outsiders it is not clear what exactly is PLLC – yet another „preparatory“, training organization, or a real „labor market organization“? It would be good to explain these cultural issues for external readers.

Author Response

Thank you very much for the review. I sent the version revised according to your remarks to the editor two days ago, but I just received her message that I should reply to the reviewers first and upload it to the system, so this is what I will try to do now.

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

The changes you have made have improved your article and I have no problem understanding the process, results and discussion.