چكيده فارسي :
The digital information age requires skills and strategies that are crucial in comprehending academic online texts. Also, critical thinking is a rapidly growing concept in education. Thus, the present study has designed to (a) explore Iranian EFL students’ profiles of metacognitive online reading strategies in reading academic texts and critical thinking; and (b) investigate the relationship between EFL students’ metacognitive online reading strategies and their critical thinking. To these ends, 80 (20 male and 60 female) Iranian intermediate-level EFL university students, selected nonrandomly from Shahrekord University, participated in this mixed-methods study and responded to the Online Survey of Reading Strategies (OSORS) and California Critical Thinking Skills Test-Form B (CCTST-B-34). Then, based on their responses to the OSORS, 10 EFL students were chosen to undertake think-aloud online reading tasks. The descriptive statistics indicated that EFL students preferred to use problem solving strategies followed by global and support strategies respectively. In addition, the results of a think-aloud procedure showed that EFL readers employed the online metacognitive strategies differently in both quality and frequency. Also, evaluation, inductive, and analysis skills of critical thinking were used mostly by EFL university students. Furthermore, correlation analysis revealed a positive significant relationship between metacognitive online reading strategies and critical thinking, in general. The findings provided implications for practitioners, researchers, teachersin the area of EFL pedagogy, and also, for EFL learners who intend to improve their online reading comprehension.
