LANGUAGE FEATURES ON THE CRITICAL THINKING SKILLS OF MALE AND FEMALE STUDENTS IN ARGUMENTATIVE WRITING

The study focused on describing how language features were used on the critical thinking skills of both male and female students when they wrote argumentative writing and explaining why language features were used on the critical thinking skills of male and female students in argumentative writing. Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) by Halliday (1994) was implemented to describe language features used and collaborated with Bloom's Taxonomy (1956) which stated that High Order Critical Thinking Skills (HOTS) divided cognitive skills into six levels: a) remember, b) understand, c) apply, d) analyze, e) evaluate, and f) create. These levels were classified from lower-order thinking skills (LOTS) to higher-order thinking skills (HOTS) (Sabir et al., 2024; Aprilia et al., 2024; Кaбышева,
2023). According to the theory and research purpose, qualitative research design was implemented by using Biklen's inductive approach (2007), which involved analyzing the data in stages: thematic coding, gender comparison, triangulation, and interpretative analysis. The study was mostly about students in Grade XI at SMK Telkom 2 Medan. The writer used a purposive sampling method (Teddlie & Yu: 2007) to choose 30 participants, 15 male and 15 female students. Understanding these differences can help teachers plan lessons and design curricula that will help all students improve their critical thinking skills