The underlying assumption of recent ideas of applied ELT, life syllabus and educational language teaching is that ELT professionals should center their attention on the enhancement of learners' life skills, say, critical thinking prior to language-related skills. Despite the high premium placed on enhancing the critical thinking abilities in educational policies, and granted that English language classes have unique potentials for promoting learners' life skills such as critical thinking, it seems that ELT teachers are lacking in a true understanding of what critical thinking really means and whether or not it should be incorporated into the ELT curriculum. In the present study, EFL teachers in Iran were surveyed and interviewed regarding such a necessity. The first phase involved the collection of quantitative data via the administration of a short scale comprising Likert-style questions to Iranian EFL teachers (N = 106). Analysis of the questionnaire results revealed that EFL teachers tended to express strong support for the incorporation of critical thinking into the ELT curriculum. Follow-up face-to-face interviews were carried out with a subsample (N = 5) selected from Phase 1 participants. The interview results added more plausibility to the survey results. The theoretical and practical implications of this study are discussed.

The study reported in this paper seeks to examine the relationship between pre-service EFL teachers' epistemological beliefs and their conceptions of teaching and learning. A questionnaire survey was conducted. To this end, two scales (i.e. the Teaching and Learning Conceptions Questionnaire and the Epistemological Beliefs Scale) developed by Chan and Elliott (2004) were administered to 92 Iranian pre-service EFL teachers to examine their epistemological beliefs as well as conceptions of teaching and learning. The findings of this study revealed that pre-service English teachers in Iran tended to endorse, from among the four categories of epistemological beliefs, the innate/fixed ability and certainty knowledge. Also, most of the participants tended to endorse traditional conceptions about language teaching and learning which was considered to be reminiscent of the modern era of English language teaching. Furthermore, the findings demonstrated significant positive relationships between traditional teaching/learning conceptions and some categories of epistemological beliefs such as 'innate/fixed ability' and 'certainty knowledge'. Moreover, the results indicated significant correlations between constructivist conceptions and pre-service teachers' 'learning effort/process' beliefs. Finally, certain implications for the English education of Iran were discussed in the context of postmodernism in English language teaching.

This study sets out to investigate the relationship between patterns of motivation and L2 listeners’ metacognitive awareness and perceived use of strategies. A total number of 3o upper intermediate students from two English language teaching Institutes in Isfahan took part in this study. They were asked to fill in two questionnaires: (a) a questionnaire on motivation, which was developed by Vallerand et al. (1992), and (b) a questionnaire on Metacognitive awareness strategies in listening developed by Vandergrift et al. (2006). The results of the study revealed that: 1) there is no significant difference in terms of type of motivation among Iranian upper intermediate EFL learners .2) In the category of mecognitive strategies, problem solving was the most frequently used strategy and planning and evaltuation was the least frequently used one. 3) Positive relationship was found between both types of motivation and use of metacognitive awareness strategies, except for mental translation and intrinsic motivation. 4) There was significant difference in mean scores of high and low motivation groups, for three categories of metacoginitive awareness strategies including planning and evaluation, directed attention, and person knowledge. This study suggested that listeners’ metacognitive awareness should be cultivated and strategy instruction should be integrated into the teaching of listening

One of the key life skills advocated by the World Health Organization (1999) to be incorporated into any curriculum is 'creativity'. With the advent of the notion of Applied ELT (Pishghadam, 2011), which considers ELT as an independent discipline now able to contribute to and enrich other domains of knowledge, the idea of life skills education was soon imported into the field of English language teaching. In this connection, it seems that figuring out ways to improve life skills, say, creativity in language learners should be given well-deserved attention. Be that as it may, this paper explores whether and to what extent reading and writing activities can provide abundant opportunities for creative ideas to flourish.Specifically, this study explored the extent to which extensive practice in academic and personal reading and/or writing would be related to high creative thinking. For this purpose, a sample of 300 intermediate EFL learners in Iran participated in this study by filling out a self-report questionnaire and completing the Abbreviated Torrance Test for Adults (ATTA). The questionnaire inquires about the total courses taken in reading and writing as well as the total hours spent on reading and writing in both L1 and L2. The results revealed that learners who spent more time on reading and writing had a significantly better performance on the creativity test. That is, creative thinking scores (fluency, originality, elaboration, flexibility, and the Creativity Index) showed significant correlations with the amount of time spent on reading and writing.

This paper reports a two-phase study. Phase 1 of the study was aimed at developing a self-report scale based on which to analyze language teachers' perceptions toward the inclusion of critical thinking components in language teaching materials. To this end, we developed a 17-item Criticality-oriented English Teaching Perceptions Inventory (hereafter CETPI). In Phase 2 of the study, we examined the reliability and construct validity of the CEPTI using data collected from 150 teachers of English as a Foreign Language (EFL), mainly through employing the Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA). The results indicated that the CEPTI enjoys a high internal consistency (α=0.93). Further, having determined a factorable sample through the Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin (KMO) test of Sampling Adequacy and Bartlett's Test of Sphericity, EFA was applied to the data. Moreover, the results obtained from Principal Component Analysis (PCA), the Scree Test, and the Component Plot in Rotated Space all supported a three-factor solution for the grouping of the items in the inventory.