Listening And Critical Thinking Skills

Background and Purpose

One of the significant 21st century skills is critical thinking (CT) , which is a term described by educators and researchers as a skill of learning, thinking , and analyzing that goes beyond the memorization and recall of information,( lai,2011). Paul (1985) defined CT is “learning how to ask and answer questions of analysis, synthesis and evaluation” (p. 37). Educational researchers have believed that critical thinking takes an important role in learning process. For example, some theorists and educators like Piaget (1971) and Vygotsky (1962) confirmed there are close relationships between language and thinking skills (cited in Faravani,2015). Similarly, Chaffee (1985) and Paul (1995) mentioned that

It plays a vital role for listening and obtaining comprehensible input that is essential for language development . Listening is also considered important when a learner is learning English as a second or foreign language ( ESL/EFL). Chastain (1988) highlighted the importance of this skill in second language learning by defining listening as “ the ability to comprehend the spoken second language that plays an essential role in second language learning and use,(p.209). According to Zare,Behjat and Abdollrahimzadeh (2013) listening is the most difficult and frequently skill which is used. It takes an important part in our daily communication and It makes a significant contribution in second/foreign language learning. Nunan (1998) asserted that, “listening is the basic skill in language learning … in fact over 50% of the time that students spend functioning in a foreign language will be devoted to listening”,(Cited in Zare,Behjat & Abdollrahimzadeh ,2013 ).Consequently, in recent decades more notice has been on this skill and it has gained more L2/FL teachers and researchers' attention and. Since the significant role of listening in second language learning is confirmed (Olia & Nikou ,2016), language teachers should make more effort to improve their students’ listening comprehension to help them have more confidence and participation. According to Nunan (2002), learners

The most common hierarchy for ranking the cognitive level of questions is Bloom’s Taxonomy (1956), which consists of six categories of cognitive responses, named knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation . The first level of taxonomy, knowledge, questions are asked to test whether a student has gained specific information from the lesson .therefore, the student should recognize or recall information. In the comprehension level, students will be able to interpret the facts and they go beyond recall information .they require sufficient understanding to organize and arrange material mentally . In third level, application , questions are those that require students to apply a rule or process for a problem to find the right answer . They might be asked to solve a problem with the information they have gained in class . In the analysis level, students will be required to go beyond knowledge and application and see all patterns that they can use to analyze a problem .Therefore, they have to identify reasons to reach a conclusion .In synthesis level, questions are asked to make the student to use the given facts for creating new theories or making predictions. This level allows students to think creatively to solve problems.The last level of taxonomy, evaluation, requires the student to assess information or judge an idea to come to a