No abstract

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

Gender bias is unfortunately still present in many societies especially the developing countries. Such prejudice is in most cases in favor of males and against females. While females nowadays comprise a great majority of the work force all around the world, they are still being looked upon as the weaker sex associated with stereotypical roles as stay-at-home mothers whose main task is to breed children, wash the dishes, etc.Such prejudice if present in a society gets manifested in its EFL/ ESL materials. The main purpose of the present study is to examine the extent and types of gender bias in two of the Iranian mostly used EFL textbooks at the high school level. Sexism will be investigated in five categories of visibility, firstness, generic masculine constructions, sex-linked occupations and activities. The findings are expected to raise awareness regarding sexist practices in EFL material developers, teachers and learners.

The aim of this study is to explore the effect of metacognitive strategy instruction on the listening performance of EFL university students. The participants were 82 students studying English translation and literature at Shahid Beheshti University. After screening the participants, 62 of them were selected and assigned to experimental and control groups. The experimental group (n=32) received the strategy training following the models proposed by Vandergrift and Tafaghodtari (2010) and O'Malley and Chamot (1990), while the control group (n=30) received no instruction. The listening section of the TOEFL was utilized to measure the listening performance of the participants before and after the treatment. The results revealed that experimental group significantly outperformed the control group on the post test measure.

There has been a growing body of research in the few past decades on the role of metacognition in learning. In line with the evolution of research in the area of metacognition in education, there is a growing need for the better understanding the nature of the construct in foreign language (FL) teaching especially writing skill. In an attempt to develop a model of writing metacognitive awareness, based on both Flavel's (1987) and the two-dimensional dichotomy of knowledge and regulation of cognition (Brown, 1987;Jacobs & Paris, 1987;Schraw & Moshman, 1995), 59 English as a foreign language (EFL) learners with different proficiency levels were divided into two novice and expert groups. After writing an essay, the participants took part in a semi-structured interview. The content analysis of the data as well as the related literature revealed a model for Iranian EFL learners' writing metacognitive awareness in which knowledge of cognition with four subcomponents and regulation of cognition with five sub-components emerged.