In this essay, I propose that EFL teachers within a collegiate setting possess a two-fold mandate: Most obviously, they must present language lessons throughout the course of the term that are appropriate for the level of their students. But if student experience in their English courses is limited to language training exercises, then they have missed a valuable opportunity to cultivate their capacities for critical and independent thinking.A most predictable retort would be that students can hardly be expected to display critical thinking prowess in a language in which they have attained only rudimentary facility. Indeed, in English departments throughout Japan, there is a widely held assumption among both students and teachers that many students, particularly at the lower levels, will gain little or no facility in using practical, day-to-day English, much less academic English.This argument rests on the assumption that students, within the context of the English classroom, lose their facility for addressing their own confusion through formulating questions, drawing inferences, and stating hypotheses because of a limited grasp of English. Given the larger mandate of the university, it is most appropriate that students enhance their abilities to think critically as a result of how they are being asked to train in their new language, regardless of their demonstrated ability, and regardless of the extent to which they depend upon Japanese for understanding the full breadth of their classroom experience.A key assumption of the argument being put forth is that critical thinking is a pragmatic set of behaviors connected to or arising out of specific contexts. Making systematic and strategic attempts to inch toward the completion of a goal might serve as a succinct description of what critical thinkers do, and one might therefore isolate and describe what counts as critical thinking in any given context. We might say that in every context of scholastic endeavor there exists both a goal that the student pursues as well as a range of possible strategies for pursuing it. Critical thinking, in this sense, is comparative. This of course implies that it would hardly be appropriate to say that at 17 some levels of study students are engaged in activities befitting critical thought and that at other levels they are not.It ought not to be assumed that critical thinking is relegated to so-called "higher" functions, such as those at work in the synthesizing of large amounts of complex data according to what would be seen as a daring and original hypothesis. Arguably, most critical thinking activities, the ones we most rely upon for organizing our lives, are quite mundane. Within a scholastic context, such activities consist of major study skills, which include responding to instructor cues, planning daily tasks, and managing data flow within the contexts of both single and multiple assignments.When students possess very minimal abilities in their chosen language subject, some aspects of study skills management become less easy t...

In the face of too much incoming information and too many people trying to convince us in today's world, the ability to think critically gains an ever greater saliency as a prime goal of student and teacher education. The present study aimed at substantiating the relationship between EFL teachers' critical thinking ability and their student-evaluated professional success. To this end, measures of the critical thinking ability of 67 Iranian EFL teachers were obtained using the Farsi version of Watson-Glaser

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The pressing need for English oral communication skills in multifarious contexts today is compelling impetus behind the large number of studies done on oral proficiency interviewing. Moreover, given the recently articulated concerns with the fairness and social dimension of such interviews, parallel concerns have been raised as to how most fairly to assess the oral communication skills of examinees, and what factors contribute to more skilled performance. This article sketches theory and practice on two rather competing formats of oral proficiency interviewing: face-to-face and paired. In the first place, it reviews the related literature on the alleged disadvantages of the individual format. Then, the pros and cons of the paired format are enumerated. It is discussed that the paired format has indeed met some of the criticisms leveled at individual oral proficiency interviewing. However, exploitation of the paired format as an undisputable alternative to the face-to-face format begs the question.

Refuting Krashen's Input Hypothesis, some SLA researchers have called attention to the vitality of learner output in the development of their interlanguage systems, which is the essence of Swain's (1985) Output Hypothesis. The present study sought to find out the extent to which elementary EFL learners' output promotes their learning of the English simple present tense. To this end, 33 Iranian EFL learners were assigned into a control and an experimental group. Both groups were presented with three texts including rich examples of the structure, over three one-hour sessions. Following the presentation of the text on each session, the experimental group engaged in two output tasks: a reconstruction task, in which they individually reconstructed in written form the text they had been exposed to, and a picture description task, in which they worked in pairs to produce a written description of three pictures, one on each session, while the control group only answered comprehension questions based on the texts. The comparison of the pre-test and the immediate and delayed post-test results indicated a significant gain in the experimental group's performance immediately after the treatment, but only a trend toward significance within three weeks of the experimental period. The results show clear benefits arising from pushing students to produce second language output for the shortterm and long-term learning of the English simple present tense. However, offering more output opportunities over time might be the key to the efficiency of learner output in the acquisition of the target language form.