Critical thinking plays a pivotal role in teaching and learning, and it is especially crucial for learners at the tertiary level. Recent studies in education have shown increasing interest in developing learners’ critical thinking skills, as cultivating such skills provides important opportunities to enhance their knowledge and competencies. Therefore, investigating learners’ perceptions of critical thinking behaviors is essential for academic development in higher education. However, research in this area remains limited, particularly at the university level in Vietnam. For this reason, the present study was conducted to explore students’ perceptions of the behavioral manifestations of critical thinking in their learning at a university in Viet Nam. The data were collected from 287 English majors, complemented by in-depth interviews with 24 students. The findings reveal that English majors frequently engage in critical-thinking skills across various aspects of their academic activities, and that male students tend to demonstrate these behaviors more often than female students. The results further show that there is insufficient statistical evidence to conclude that learning experience (year of study) influences students’ critical-thinking behaviors. Based on these findings, the study contributes to a clearer understanding of how critical-thinking behaviors manifest among English majors in the Vietnamese higher education context.