the influence of social and cultural capital on efl students critical thinking skills

the major aim of this study was to investigate the relationship between social and cultural capital and efl students’ critical thinking skills. this study takes this relationship in to account to see if people with different sociocultural status are different regarding their critical thinking skills. to this end, 160 university students majoring in english language and literature, english translation and teaching english were chosen. the students were studying in ferdowsi university of mashhad, azad university and tabaran university. they were asked to fill out social and cultural capital questionnaire (sccq) and watson-glazer critical thinking appraisal (wgcta) which included five subcomponents. the results of the coorrelational study indicated that social and cultural capitals are positively correlated with measures of critical thinking skills. all factors of social capital, namely social competence, social solidarity and extraversion, correlated with measures of inference and deduction. measures of recognition of assumptions and evaluation of arguments only correlated with social competence and social solidarity. among cultural capital factors, i.e. cultural competence and literacy, both factors correlated with measures of inference, recognition of assumptions and interpretation. measures of evaluation of arguments only correlated with literacy. the results showed no correlation between measures of deduction and cultural capital factors. the results of the regression equations also revealed that social and cultural capital scores can predict measures of subcomponent critical thinking skills. social competence and social solidarity can predict measures of inference. however, social solidarity was a better predictor. recognition of assumptions, deduction, interpretation and evaluation of arguments can be predicted by social solidarity. literacy can predict measures of inference, interpretation and evaluation of arguments. measures of recognition of assumptions can be predicted by both cultural competence and literacy; however, literacy is a better predictor.