Iranian EFL Learners' Critical Thinking and Relationship between their Ability to Draw Inferences in Reading Comprehension

Among the different factors that may influence reading comprehension, critical thinking and inferential ability seem to be very important. The relationship between Iranian EFL learners' critical thinking and their inferential ability in reading comprehension regarding gender and language proficiency will be investigated in this study. The present study tried to see if there was any statistically significant relationship between Iranian EFL learners' critical thinking and their inferential ability in reading comprehension. Moreover, it attempted to see if there was any statistically significant difference between the correlation coefficients of Iranian EFL learners' critical thinking and their inferential ability in reading comprehension regarding gender. Also, it tried to investigate if there was any statistically significant difference between the correlation coefficients of Iranian EFL learners' critical thinking and their inferential ability in reading comprehension regarding language proficiency. The participants were ۱۲۷ students (۴۸ males and ۷۹ females) majoring in English literature, English language teaching, and English translation at the University of Isfahan, the Islamic Azad University (Isfahan Khorasgan Branch), the Sheikh Bahaie University, Payame Noor University, and the Islamic Azad University (Najafabad Branch) in Iran. For collecting the data, a quick placement test, a critical research questionnaire, and an inferential reading comprehension test were administered to the participants. The results of the Pearson correlation coefficient revealed that there was a positive significant correlation between critical thinking and inferential ability in reading comprehension. Also, the observed Z score showed that there was no statistically significant difference between the two correlation coefficients regarding gender. The findings of this study emphasize the importance of the relationship between critical thinking, and inferential ability in reading comprehension regarding gender and language proficiency in language learning and teaching.