Critical thinking skills are undoubtedly considered today as an important outcome of higher education, they are viewed as essential abilities that need to be germinated and developed in order to train a qualified specialist. This paper throws some light on the current teaching approaches applied in General Linguistics and Translation Studies Department (KAZGUU, Kazakhstan) aimed to improve language students’ critical thinking capacity. One of such approaches described in the article is interactive home reading class specially designed for students learning English as a foreign language. Home reading classes are not merely designed for students predominantly perceiving world verbally while reading, but can be easily changed in such classes that can satisfy requirements and preferences of students having dominant interpersonal intelligence, bodily-kinesthetic intelligence, existential intelligence, special intelligence. All this is achievable due to, firstly, interactive teaching methods when students can cooperate whether in class or out of it, mingle in the class, and secondly, thanks to new technologies making lessons more vivid and exciting. Films give students an opportunity to observe the details they missed in the narration while reading, to get film director’s point of view on the issues described in the text, as films are also considered as a form of text interpretation. The given research was carried out with the help of such methods as sociological survey among students, statistical analysis, observation and descriptive method. Overall, the information is presented in the form of reflection on present situation in the department and personal teaching experience.