Exploring higher order thinking skills (HOTs) through lecturers’ beliefs and practices in teaching speaking skills

Fostering HOTS in speaking instruction is increasingly recognized as essential for developing students’ communicative and critical thinking capacities. However, research examining how HOTS is understood and enacted in speaking instruction, particularly from lecturers’ perspectives, remains limited. This qualitative phenomenological study explored lecturers’ beliefs and practices regarding the integration of HOTS in teaching speaking to university students. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with five English lecturers from a private university in Central Java, Indonesia, and the data were analyzed through inductive coding, thematic analysis, and phenomenological synthesis. The findings reveal that lecturers conceptualize speaking not merely as a communicative skill, but as a cognitive space through which students’ thinking becomes visible and pedagogically accessible. HOTS development in speaking is experienced as a progressive and non-linear process, shaped by the interaction between cognitive readiness, linguistic capacity, and affective conditions. Lecturers enact these beliefs through adaptive pedagogical practices, including flexible task sequencing, cognitively demanding speaking activities, and ongoing collegial learning. The study contributes to HOTS and language pedagogy by conceptualizing HOTS-oriented speaking instruction as an integrated cognitive–linguistic–affective pedagogical orientation, providing conceptual insights for designing speaking instruction that supports higher-order thinking skills required for success in the 21st century.