RAISING ELT STUDENTS’ AWARENESS ON THE IMPORTANCE OF CRITICAL THINKING IN LANGUAGE EDUCATION

Critical thinking is an essential concept gaining more and more attention of shareholders particularly in bussiness, and education lately. When the fact that today’s students have to deal with astounding information overload is taken into consideration, cultivation of it is an inevitable goal for professionals in education (Lipman, 2003; Lun et al., 2010; Ketabi, 2013). In order to teach such a skill in the classroom, teachers must first develop an awareness of what critical thinking is and possess the dispositions to an extent so that they can set an example for the learners. Thus, the current study aimed to investigate whether a training on the conception of critical thinking and its integration into language teaching brought about any cognitive change in a group of freshman ELT students. Having been guided with related reading resources, tasks and a specific technique (The PMI) developed by Edward de Bono (1985), participants demonstrated an increased awareness of critical thinking as an educational concept and its use in English teaching. The results of the study are expected to be enlightening for designing realistic and effective pre-service training programs to integrate critical thinking into English language teaching.