The Effect of Teaching Critical Thinking Skills on Utilizing the Attitudinal Markers in Iranian EFL Learner s Argumentative essay Writing

Beyond developing writing skill as one of fundamentals of second language learning, enhancing learner s ability to convey their meaning and express their attitudes is an especially crucial task. Hereupon, stance- taking has been recognized a challenging concern of most of Iranian EFL learners in writing experience. Therefore, the present study has made attempt to investigate the effect of critical thinking on utilizing the attitudinal stance in argumentative essay writing of Iranian intermediate EFL learners. For this purpose, 60 participants of the study were selected based on their performance in TOFEL test. After dividing the participants into the experimental and control groups, the pretest of writing was administered to the all participants. Then both groups were taught academic essay writing for 16 sessions and along with, 5 sessions allocated to the experimental group in receiving special treatment with critical thinking skills. Having passed the treatment, both groups took a posttest on argumentative essay writing. The data were analyzed through Chi-square and the results revealed that regarding the critical thinking skills, there were significant differences between experimental and control groups in stance-taking. Also, experimental group showed more endeavor to employ attitude verbs and adjectives while reporting their essay.