The Effects of Concept Mapping and Critical Thinking Test Strategies on EFL Iranian Learners' Reading Comprehension

This research was designed to investigate the effects of critical thinking and concept mappingtest strategies on EFL Iranian learners' reading comprehension in five sessions during near twomonths. Fifty eight male and female students took a pre-test as a language proficiency test first,then they were randomly assigned to two experimental groups and a control group, twentystudents for critical thinking group, nineteen students for concept mapping group and nineteenstudents for control group were selected randomly. During four sessions of the treatment, eachexperimental group worked on four reading passages taken from different journals. Theparticipants in two experimental groups were encouraged to think critically and noticemeaningfully to the arrows showing how concepts are linked in reading passages. Thinkingcritically included evaluation, analysis, and synthesis and reasoning for critical thinking teststrategy, and finding interrelated concept connections by mapping meaningful graphs forconcept mapping test strategy. Along with the experimental groups, the participants in thecontrol group also worked on the same four reading passages, but they were taught scanning,skimming, previewing, predicting, and guessing meaning from the context in order to improvetheir reading comprehension skills. At the end of four sections of treatment, three post testswere performed in one session. Finally One-way ANOVA was used to analyze the results ofthe control and the two experimental groups’ post- tests, and a significant difference wasobserved in the two critical thinking group and control group, but there was not observed anysignificant difference between the concept mapping group and control group.