The Relationship between EFL Teachers’ Critical Thinking and Use of Motivational Strategies

Gholamreza Parsi

doi:10.7575/aiac.alls.v.8n.2p.14

Abstract

The present study was conducted to investigate the relationship between EFL teachers’ critical thinking and use of motivational strategies. The participants of this study were 101 EFL teachers. These teachers were both male and female between 21 to 36 years old, and they taught intermediate and advanced levels and varied in their experience from 3 to 17 years. They were chosen randomly from private language schools in Mashhad and two questionnaires were given to them: A questionnaire to evaluate the use of motivational strategies (Cheng and Dornyei, 2007) and another questionnaire to estimate their critical thinking (Honey, 2000).To fulfill the objective of the study, a Spearman Rank Order Correlational analysis was conducted to investigate any significant relationship between the two variables. The results showed that there is no correlation between critical thinking and motivational strategies. This result may help teacher educators to consider the relationship of critical thinking and teachers’ use of motivational strategies as an integral part of the teaching and learning process in teacher training courses.

Highlights

In the last few decades, due to the advance of the digital world, there has been a gradual but significant emphasis on adults’ critical thinking in the context of education
Given the hypothesis mentioned earlier, the first statistical procedure was to conduct a series of descriptive data analysis on the results of the Peters’ Honry Critical thinking questionnaire (CTQ)
; critical thinking is not making a significant contribution to the prediction of motivational strategies

Summary

Introduction

In the last few decades, due to the advance of the digital world, there has been a gradual but significant emphasis on adults’ critical thinking in the context of education. Critical thinking gains its importance partly because the adults who want to live, work and function adequately in the world that changes rapidly, have to enhance their skills in order to generate valuable and creative ideas. These skills are referred to a concept which is known as critical thinking (Ennis, 1996). As Mason (2007) maintains, many philosophers have advanced theories of critical thinking. According to Siegel (1990), critical thinking is a critical viewpoint or character for example the disposition to ask investigating questions, or critical orientation

Objectives

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion