Abstract

This study examines how university English-major students perceive opportunities for critical thinking in English as a foreign language (EFL) courses. Framed by affordance theory, it treats a resource, a classroom routine, or an assessment task as an affordance for reasoning only when the learner can detect it and act on it. Sixty-three undergraduate English majors at one Saudi university completed an adapted Learning Environment Affordance Survey for Critical Thinking (LEAS-CT) with five-point responses. Descriptive summaries, internal-consistency coefficients, and an exploratory factor analysis (EFA) with minimum-residual extraction, oblimin rotation, and parallel analysis were examined after duplicated export fields were removed. Students rated rich resources (M = 4.41, SD = 0.51), interactive negotiation (M = 4.43, SD = 0.54), and quality tasks (M = 4.37, SD = 0.58) similarly favourably. The confidence intervals around these means overlapped almost entirely, so the dimensions cannot be meaningfully ranked. Internal consistency was high for the two subscales for which item-level data were available. Because the sample was small and sampling adequacy borderline (Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin = .50), the two-factor solution is reported as a provisional observation requiring replication rather than as a validation result. Perceived support for reasoning was distributed across materials, dialogue, and tasks rather than concentrated in one channel. Conclusions are confined to students' perceptions of the learning environment and are not evidence of critical-thinking performance or of its development; the single-site design, sample size, and measurement constraints are stated, and replication across institutions combining the survey with observation and student writing is proposed.

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