Literature invites readers to look beyond the words on a page, interpret what remains unsaid, and connect ideas in ways that reveal deeper meaning. For university students, this process can be an important exercise in developing their reasoning skills. As a faculty member of LAU’s English and Creative Arts Department at the School of Arts and Sciences, Associate Professor of Applied Linguistics Victor Khachan knows this firsthand.

Yet a researcher’s instinct is not simply to observe, but to measure. Drawing on his expertise in corpus linguistics, Dr. Khachan conducted a study alongside former LAU Professor of Applied Linguistics Nahla Nola Bacha examining how students interpret literary texts. Titled “Critical Thinking in a Learner Literary Corpus: Thematic Extrapolations in Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms,” the paper was published earlier this year in the International Journal of Arabic-English Studies.

“The idea for this research did not begin with software or statistics,” said Dr. Khachan. “It began with a recurring conversation with Dr. Bacha about a question that many literature and academic writing instructors often wrestle with: not simply whether students are thinking critically, but how deep.”

Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms provided a particularly suitable case study. Known for his “iceberg theory” of writing, Hemingway often leaves significant emotional and thematic content unstated, inviting readers to infer meaning beyond the surface of the narrative.

“His reputation for saying less and leaving more beneath the surface puts much of the interpretive work in the reader’s hands,” Dr. Khachan explained. “This offered a natural testing ground for our question.”

The study examines 206 literary essays written by students enrolled in the 20th Century American Novel course. Using corpus analysis, the researchers investigate recurring themes in the essays and compare students’ interpretations with the language of Hemingway’s novel. Specifically, the analysis examines collocational networks in both the essays and the novel, tracing how words cluster together to explore patterns of meaning beyond the story itself.

“This quantitative method of text analysis helps us determine whether the writing stays close to narration or moves deeper into inference, evaluation, and connection,” Dr. Khachan noted. “In that sense, the numbers do not replace interpretation; they make its patterns easier to see.”

Systematically, students connect “war” with “brutality”, “chaos”, and “devastation” and “love” with both “honesty” and “superficiality,” signaling powerful interpretations through thematic networks beyond Hemingway’s narrative storyline.

And that brings us back to the pedagogical question that started it all. “If critical thinking leaves patterns in language, then quantifying those patterns is no longer a methodological option,” said Dr. Khachan. “It is becoming an essential part of how we understand and evaluate writing.”

The study not only validates the importance of literature courses in developing students’ critical thinking skills, but also provides a new metric to measure those skills.

To browse more scholarly output by the LAU community, visit our open-access digital archive, the Lebanese American University Repository (LAUR).