Autonomous Learning and Critical Thinking: Inspecting the association among EFL Learners

The thrust of the current study was to investigate the relationship between Critical Thinking (CT) and Autonomy (AU) among EFL learners. To this end, a group of 182 male and female learners, between 19 and 40 years old, majoring in English Translation and English Literature at Islamic Azad University at Central Tehran and Roudehen were randomly selected and were given two questionnaires: a questionnaire of AU by Spratt, Humphreys, and Chan (2002) and a questionnaire of CT developed by Honey (2000). The relationship between CT and AU was investigated using Pearson product-moment correlation coefficient. Preliminary analyses were performed to ensure no violation of the assumptions of normality, linearity and homoscedasticity. The results of this study indicated that there is a significant and positive relationship between EFL learners’ CT and AU (r= 0.736, p<0.05). Considering AU as the predicted variable of this study, it was confirmed that CT makes a large unique contribution to explaining AU. Since a significant relationship was found between AU and CT, it can be concluded that the obtained results may help EFL teachers, material developers, and educational policy makers to bear in mind the benefits of developing their learners’ AU and CT.

کلیدواژه ها:

Autonomy ، critical thinking ، effective learning ، student-centered methodology