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Investigating the Relationship between Critical Thinking Skills and the Quality of Iranian Intermediate TEFL Students’ Writing
Abstract
The current study intended to find out the relationship between critical thinking skills and the quality of Iranian TEFL (Teaching English as a Foreign Language) students’ writing. One-hundred forty students who were homogeneous in their language proficiency were selected non-randomly. The researcher asked students to take part in a proficiency test named Nelson test (intermediate 200B) and she chose students whose level was intermediate as participants of the study. This study was an associational (correlational) study. To achieve the goal of the study California Critical Thinking Test (form B) was administered among intermediate students to measure students’ critical thinking skills (analysis, evaluation, inference). Then the researcher asked the participants to write on a given topic and their writings were rated by two language teachers by following the rules of scoring in Quellmaz's scale. The inter-rater correlation across all papers calculated in order to be sure about the objectivity and reliability of scores. The Pearson-Product Moment was used to examine the relationship between variables, furthermore multiple regressions was applied to predict the degree of their relationship. The results of the study revealed that there is a positive relationship between critical thing skills and writing quality. Furthermore, it was proved that evaluation has the strongest degree of relationship with the quality of writing.
Keywords: Critical thinking, analysis, evaluation, inference, writing quality
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