Contributory Role of Critical Thinking in Enhancing Reading Comprehension Ability of Iranian ESP Students

The present study aimed to investigate the possible relationship between ESPlearners’ critical thinking abilities and their reading comprehension. For thispurpose, from the population of students studying in different fields ofengineering at Amol Islamic Azad University, a sample of 202 ESPparticipants were selected based on a purposive sampling method. A criticalthinking questionnaire was then given whereby the targeted respondentsanswered the prompts underlying the critical thinking construct.Subsequently, a valid reading comprehension test with an acceptablereliability index was administered and the data were analyzed using therelated descriptive and inferential statistics. The findings revealed that therewas a robust and positive correlation between ESP learners’ levels of criticalthinking ability and their reading comprehension. Moreover, it was foundthat ESP students regarded as high critical thinkers significantlyoutperformed those with lower levels of critical thinking on the readingcomprehension test. Notably, the results may offer useful implications toboth language teachers and English learners indicating that critical thinkingstrategies play a pivotal role in the reading comprehension process.

کلیدواژه ها:

academic text ، critical thinking ، ESP students ، reading comprehension