The Effects of Concept Mapping and Critical Thinking Test Strategies on EFL Iranian Learners' Reading Comprehension

Journal of Teaching English Lnaguage Studies

مقاله 2، دوره 6، شماره 4، شهریور 2018، صفحه 33-54   

نویسندگان

Ata Maleki؛ Zeynab Chegini

چکیده

This research was designed to investigate the effects of critical thinking and concept mapping
test strategies on EFL Iranian learners' reading comprehension in five sessions during near two
months. Fifty eight male and female students took a pre-test as a language proficiency test first,
then they were randomly assigned to two experimental groups and a control group, twenty
students for critical thinking group, nineteen students for concept mapping group and nineteen
students for control group were selected randomly. During four sessions of the treatment, each
experimental group worked on four reading passages taken from different journals. The
participants in two experimental groups were encouraged to think critically and notice
meaningfully to the arrows showing how concepts are linked in reading passages. Thinking
critically included evaluation, analysis, and synthesis and reasoning for critical thinking test
strategy, and finding interrelated concept connections by mapping meaningful graphs for
concept mapping test strategy. Along with the experimental groups, the participants in the
control group also worked on the same four reading passages, but they were taught scanning,
skimming, previewing, predicting, and guessing meaning from the context in order to improve
their reading comprehension skills. At the end of four sections of treatment, three post tests
were performed in one session. Finally One-way ANOVA was used to analyze the results of
the control and the two experimental groups’ post- tests, and a significant difference was
observed in the two critical thinking group and control group, but there was not observed any
significant difference between the concept mapping group and control group.

کلیدواژه‌ها

critical thinking؛ concept mapping؛ reading comprehension؛ language proficiency؛ pre and post-test

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