There is a longstanding belief that critical thinking is exclusively embedded in the Western Anglo-Saxon culture and language, thereby non-Western students using English as an additional language may not be capable of critical thinking (e.g., Atkinson, 1997). This paper reports on a study that questions this belief. The study explored the accounts of eight non-Western, international doctoral students at a New Zealand university and also analyzed their academic texts. The data of the study suggested that criticality or critical thinking was found in these students' verbal accounts. What they appeared to struggle was to express their critical thinking academically. This paper argues that, unlike the claim, non-Western students should learn critical thinking itself in the course of learning English; they may need to develop skills to communicate their critical thinking effectively in the English-medium academic context.