The goal of the current study was to investigate the effects of critical thinking skill on EFL learners’ cause and effect essay writing and their attitudes towards it. To achieve this goal, 60 Iranian upper-intermediate EFL learners were randomly divided into two equal control and experimental groups. After evaluating their knowledge of writing, the conventional teaching methods were used for the control group while an eight-step method was used to promote the critical thinking skill for the experimental group. Then the participants sat for the second test to assess the effect of critical thinking instruction and to compare the groups with each other. Elicitation of their attitudes towards the method was done by the questionnaire. The results revealed that the critical thinking instruction had meaningful consequences on the cause and effect essay writing of the participants, and the participants had positive attitudes towards the training. The findings of the research can recommend useful suggestions for the instruction of writing and critical thinking skills. Manuscript profile

Assuredly, learning a language other than the mother tongue is among the most complicated processes. It is a strikingly long-drawn-out experience that depends upon physical, mental, and emotional aspects. The second lan‌guage trainees should change between their understanding of self as a person speaking the first language and awareness of themselves as second language learners and this pushes them to think of how they ‘identify’ themselves. No longer have pedagogues the mere role in the worldwide education medium. Among the latest factors being studied broadly around the globe is the notion of identity. In fact, it allows for how a person figure in his or her rapport to the world and makes sense of prospect for subsequent times. Identity points up how language constructed by a variety of relationships. Bodies of reports have been carried out undertaking the research methods referring to identity showing the role of identity in learning English. This paper undertakes an analysis of the review of the studies related to two fields of identity and language. The topics in the literature are discussed over the last decades. Finally, some implications are given on identity in SLA indicating how English language learning can be affected by identity. Manuscript profile

Corrective feedback refers to a teacher or student’s reaction to a learner’s target language production containing an actual or perceived error. The last three decades have witnessed a large amount of research on the impacts of various types of corrective feedback on students’ written production. Along the same vein, the present study seeks to explore the effectiveness of providing teachers’ metalinguistic feedback vs. peers’ collaborative feedback on students’ writing performance. In so doing, the present study adopted a pretest-posttest quasi-experimental design including three upper-intermediate groups (i.e., two experimental and one control). The participants of the study were a total of 62 English as a foreign language (EFL) freshman students from two public universities in Tehran, Iran. The writing tasks utilized in the present study were adopted from IELTS writing Task 2. The results of one-way between groups analysis of variance (ANOVA) revealed that students produced significantly more lexically diverse as well as grammatically accurate language as a result of both treatments. Moreover, it was observed that collaborative peer feedback led to significantly higher lexical diversity than those of other two groups. The findings of the present study suggest that L2 teachers can opt for a combination of corrective feedback strategies to help learners improve their writing performance. Manuscript profile