The Impact of Teaching Critical Thinking Skills on Reading Comprehension of Iranian Intermediate EFL Learners

Abstract

Abstract-the purpose of the present study was to investigate the impact of teaching critical thinking skills on reading comprehension of Iranian intermediate EFL learners. A sample of 50 students from Arshia Language Institute in Ilam, Iran participated in this study. They were both male and female students who were selected among 80 students based on their performances on PET. The participants were randomly divided into experimental and control groups. First, the two groups were exposed to the pre-test of reading comprehension in order to evaluate their knowledge on reading before the treatment. Based on scores obtained from the Pretest, no significance differences were observed between two groups. After that the treatment was started and the experimental group was exposed to teaching critical thinking skills. Meanwhile, traditional methods of teaching reading comprehension were used for teaching reading comprehension to the control group. Finally, post-test of reading comprehension was delivered to both groups at the end of treatment to check possible differences. To analyze the collected data, ANCOVA was run using SPSS Software Version 16. The results showed that teaching critical thinking skills positively affect reading comprehension of intermediate EFL learners, but the interaction of gender and teaching critical thinking was not significant.

The Relationship between Iranian ESP Learners’ Translation Ability and Resilience in Reading Comprehension

“…EFL learners could use the strategies and techniques of resilience in reading and reading comprehension to improve their abilities in the second language translation. To do so, they can rely on the resilience enriching techniques such as finding relations between the concepts to be mentioned in a text, categorizing the information presented and understanding the meaning of required terms and vocabularies, extracting subcategories, focusing on major and minor ideas, and concentrating on the specific grammatical points and structures used in the text ideas (Kamali & Fahim, 2011;Karimi & Veisi, 2016;Kendeou, et al, 2005). Employing resilience in reading techniques, EFL learners can develop the techniques required for the proper text analysis and accordingly they might present good translations.…”

“…Learners also apply translation strategy on reading as whether to get the meaning of special contexts to overcome the syntactic complexities or because of memory overload (Kern, 1994). Learners' capabilities in application of L1 translation in these occasions can be interpreted as their resilience to overcome probable misunderstanding stresses (Karimi & Veisi, 2016).…”

“…Iranian ESP reading comprehension learners cannot benefit from their resilience because various impediments including their L2 reading proficiency, the negative impacts of shortage in L2 vocabulary, pain taking and time consuming process of L2 reading comprehension, and not being able to decipher the hidden meaning of the text they are covering (Karimi & Veisi, 2016). Most of the learners lose their concentration on content of the message facing with complex sentences.…”

“…Reading resilience which is mainly referred to as the capacity to undertake and discuss the complex and demanding work of reading and interpreting literary and rhetorical texts has attracted a lot of attention in the past few decades. As this skill "requires a repertoire of analytical techniques that can be deployed with confidence and flexibility" (Vera, Valenzuela, & Sotomayor, 2015, p. 693), reading resilience can address the serious problem of a good number of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners in reading, comprehending, and translating texts that draw on literary language and techniques and unfamiliar subject matter or present a novel concept (Karimi & Veisi, 2016).…”

“…In addition, some students face with psychological avoidance in their reading. This may arise from their low proficiency and efficacy in Foreign Language (FL) or some other reasons related to psychological, social and background knowledge in EFL classes (Karimi & Veisi, 2016). Then, they have to apply some cognitive and meta-cognitive strategies and solutions to overcome to this psychological tension and to get their reading success (Schmidt, 2002).…”