No abstract

Abstract-The present study was intended to investigate the impact of teaching critical thinking skills on the speaking proficiency of Iranian EFL learners in Tehran, how this impact is explained and the participants' attitudes towards explicit critical-thinking content. To achieve this goal, two groups of female Iranian intermediate EFL learners were compared on their speaking performance, with one group having been trained in critical thinking explicitly and the other as the control group. Both groups were tested prior to and after the training of the experimental group was performed. A mixed-method approach was employed in the analysis of the data. In the quantitative analysis, a quasi-experimental method was adopted to investigate the impact of teaching critical thinking skills on the speaking proficiency of the experimental group in comparison with the control group. The results indicated that teaching critical thinking explicitly has a significantly positive impact on the speaking proficiency of female Iranian adult intermediate EFL learners. Through the qualitative approach, the participants' attitudes towards their training in critical thinking were studied during in-depth interviews. The results are described in detail. Accordingly, explicit instruction of critical thinking in the English class can make a deeper impression of the language taught. Index Terms-critical thinking, speaking proficiency, English as a foreign language (EFL)

Bilingual speakers have often been found to be superior in taking the perspective of another person. Also, females are commonly found to have enhanced perspective taking (PT) abilities compared with males, with male PT being generally more easily affected by external factors. The present study investigated whether bilingualism improves PT in males more strongly than in females. In total, 108 bilingual and 108 matched monolingual adults, with equal numbers of males and females, filled in the PT subscale of the Interpersonal Reactivity index. While monolinguals showed the typical result of females scoring higher on PT than males, scores of male and female bilinguals did not differ, with both bilingual groups scoring as high as female monolinguals. Thus, bilingualism enhanced self-reported PT only in males, suggesting that male PT can be enhanced through socialization.

The present study is intended to determine how extensive exposure to target language mass media can affect foreign language learning and the poverty of the stimulus problem in the foreign language context. For this purpose, an EFL learner was studied for the period of one month and was asked to have extensive exposure to English language mass media only. The case was also asked to record her experience in a journal on a daily basis. The results indicated tangible improvement in her English speaking, listening, pronunciation and vocabulary but hardly any improvement on her English writing. A more profound impact was reported on the subject's four-year-old son who was not initially the focus of this study. The results suggest that considering the authentic, lengthy language input it provides, foreign language mass media can compensate for the problem of poverty of the stimulus in foreign language learning. It is concluded that formal language instruction and exposure to foreign language mass media outside the class can complement one another and promote foreign language learning on the whole. It is also evident that the impact of extensive language input varies with the age of the language learner, with young learners bearing more influence than adult learners as the effects of the critical period hypothesis.