The Effect of Teaching Critical Thinking on Iranian EFL Learners' EssayWriting

The present study has made an attempt to determine the effect of teaching critical thinkingskills on Iranian EFL learners' essay writing ability. To do this, a sample of 60 EFL learners wasselected based on their performance on Preliminary English Test (PET). The participants wererandomly assigned to two equal groups of control and experimental. An essay-writing test functioningas pre-test was administered on both groups in order to ensure their homogeneity in terms of writingability. The groups received 10 sessions of writing instruction; however, experimental group receivedadditional instruction and practice regarding the techniques of critical thinking. Finally, both groupstook an essay writing posttest in order to compare their writing achievements. Both pretest andposttest were scored by two raters using TOEFL rating scales. The results of paired and independentsample t-tests showed that critical thinking techniques significantly enhanced EFL learners writingability

کلیدواژه ها:

critical thinking ، writing ability ، essay writing