| Sumario: | In the contemporary information age, critical thinking is a vital competency for navigating complex, dynamic knowledge environments. This study examines how Indonesian junior-high students deploy conjunctions in descriptive essays and how these micro-linguistic choices index dimensions of critical thinking. Ninety-six Grade-VIII students at SMP Negeri 1 Balikpapan wrote essays under standardized classroom conditions; after plagiarism (<30%) and length (>100 words) screening, eightythree texts were analyzed. Using an iterative qualitative content analysis, conjunctions were coded as additive, adversative, causal, temporal, or conditional, and surrounding clausal units were mapped to ten critical-thinking categories. Inter-rater reliability on 20% of the corpus reached κ = 0.82. Information synthesis dominated (22.3%), followed by evaluation (16.0%) and cause-and-effect (14.9%); argument construction (9.6%), problem-solving (8.5%), exemplification (7.4%), analytical reasoning (6.4%), generalization (5.3%), aspirational expression (5.3%), and creativity (4.3%) comprised the remainder. To contextualize aggregate patterns, we report descriptive (non-inferential) subgroup summaries by writing proficiency (lower/medium/higher--27/28/28), which indicate monotonic increases in conjunction density and type--token ratio with proficiency. We interpret conjunction use as a candidate, context-sensitive indicator--a trace of cognitive organization--rather than a causal determinant, noting the limits of the singlesite, observational design. Pedagogically, the findings support an integrated framework that embeds explicit attention to conjunctions within genre-based writing and reasoning scaffolds (e.g., criteria-based evaluation, counterargument routines, reflective dialogue). Future work should triangulate these indicators with psychometric measures (e.g., Cornell Critical Thinking Test), extend to multimodal/genre-comparative analyses, and pursue longitudinal or multi-site designs to test generalizability.
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