Students in literature classes are expected to think critically and apply their critical and analytical skills to the texts they study. As to the writers, the factors counted by some scholars (e.g. Topping, 1968) as the demerits of the employment of literature in EFL/ESL classes including difficulty level of vocabulary, structural complexity, non-normative use of language, and even remote cultural perspectives are neither persuasive nor logical, but are exactly what can be employed to enrich language learning experiences, and enhance critical thinking. In any way, although providing students with tools of critical thinking, and more importantly, stabilize the stance of literature in its proper position is difficult, it is not far-fetched. The study was an attempt to investigate the efficacy of developing critical thinking through literature reading.

The study explored the relationship between college EFL students' beliefs and their choice of language learning strategies. The participants were 80 first-year college students (39 males and 41 females) at Roudbar Islamic Azad University. Having calculated the correlations between and among the variables in the study, the authors concluded that since p<0.50, there was certainly a relationship between the students' beliefs system and their choice of strategies. By the same token, in terms of language learning strategies, the frequent used strategy was cognitive strategies (Mean = 3.50) scored the highest, followed by meta-cognitive and memory strategies.

The purpose of the study is to investigate the issue of sexual brains in language acquisition from an etiological perspective. In a sense, the etiological scrutiny of sexual brain will enhance our understanding of brain functioning in order to avoid the totally abstract assumptions pioneered by numerous scholars in second language acquisition (SLA). To achieve the aforementioned aim, the current work taking a conservative approach holds that male-female interactional differences are primarily nature-based in language acquisition, for "individuals are initially affected by biology, before societal constructs can have any influence on them" (Lewin, 2003, p. 3).

This study was carried out to investigate the possible relationship between linguistic intelligence and recalling lexical items in second language acquisition (SLA). In this regard, 40 participants (22 females and 18 males) took part in the current study. To measure the participants' linguistic intelligence scores, the researcher used McKenzie's (1999) questionnaire. A cued-recall vocabulary test was also designed to measure the participants' recalling of lexical items in L2. Regression analyses demonstrated that the participants' linguistic intelligence did have a significant correlation with the participants' recalling of lexical items in L2.

The study of skill acquisition, as DeKeyser (1997) declares, is an important area within cognitive psychology. What is undeniable in skill acquisition is the fact that through extensive practice, the degree of attention on a task decreases and the task is performed without stopping; furthermore, the rate of error considerably decreases. The paper, in an attempt to work on situating the concept of practice in skill acquisition, goes on to hold that since each context has its own specific encoding cues, and that the skill achieved in that specific context is too specific to be transferred to other contexts, the degree of automaticity in employing the skill in that context is plausibly more than the other contexts.