Critical Thinking in General English Coursebooks Taught in Iranian Universities

The present study aimed at providing an evaluation of General English Coursebooks taught at some Iranian universities. To this end, a retrospective evaluation was designed to examine the reading comprehension questions of 10 selected General English coursebooks to the extent to which they fostered critical thinking. Then, reading comprehension questions of all units in the CBs were analyzed based on Facione’s (2011) critical thinking model (consisting of 6 features); the data were analyzed and the occurrence percentage of each feature was calculated in each CB. The results revealed the representation of critical thinking features of Facion’s (2011) model and the extent to which the Coursebooks matched the criteria in fostering critical thinking. The findings of the study seem to suggest that Iranian university students are unlikely to become critical thinkers through the study of such coursebooks.