Critical thinking is generally regarded as a desirable objective in language education, although there is disagreement on its definition, teachability to second-language learners, and integration into language classes. This paper conducts an open textual analysis of a collection of eight abstracts published between 1997 and 2024 through a lexical frequency analysis, seven-thematic coding of keywords and interpretive reading of the texts. The corpus includes 1,012 tokens and 421 word types, and the term critical thinking occurs 26 times. Explicit teaching is the main theme in seven out of eight abstracts, occurring 39 times out of 133 keyword codes, while critical pedagogy occurs in only one text and teacher training in three texts, all from 2021 and beyond. Culture is essential in all three texts published before 2002 but in only one out of the five texts written after 2018, while evidence and assessment occur mainly in texts written afterwards. This study illustrates the transformation of discussion into evidence and practice, highlights the recurring disparity between rhetoric and practice in pedagogy, and offers a five-stage integration model and a six-point research agenda. This is a pilot study and thus is restricted by a small dataset and an analysis at the level of abstracts only.
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