The Impact of Instructing Critical Thinking Activities on Reading Specific academic Texts of Iranian EFL Learners

This study sets up to investigate possible effect(s) of critical thinking activities on the specificacademic reading ability of Iranian EFL learners. To this end, 64 participants, homogenous interms of their language proficiency, were taught critical thinking activities employingPeterson s (2008) model of Critical Reading Questions and a framework of Academic SkillsUnit (2008) as a reference. The subjects were selected and randomly assigned into twocontrol and experimental groups, each consisting of 32students. The experimental group wasinstructed critical thinking activities during their reading courses while the control group wasnot exposed to such activities then the subjects’ scores on the pre-/post tests were compared.Furthermore, the results of the data analysis indicated positive impact (t (60) = 2.519, p<0.05)on the reading performance of the experimental group in the post-test. The findings of thestudy suggest that incorporating critical thinking principles and activities in reading of ESPclasses would contribute to the improvement of their comprehending of specific texts. Thefinding of this research can have some implications for ELT and teaching reading.

کلیدواژه ها:

Critical thinking ، Specific academic reading ability ، English language teaching (ELT) ، EFL learner