This article explores how systematic integration of cognitive strategies into foreign language teaching can promote the development of students’ critical thinking in higher education. Grounded in the converging literatures on cognitive strategy instruction, metacognition, and critical thinking, the study synthesizes theoretical arguments and classroom evidence to propose a coherent instructional model for language courses. The paper delineates how strategies such as elaboration, organization, inference generation, self-explanation, analogical mapping, and metacognitive regulation can be embedded in communicative tasks to elicit higher-order reasoning, argumentation, and evidence-based judgement. An analytical review and design-based reasoning approach are used to identify productive alignments between strategy use and typical foreign-language outcomes, including reading of argumentative texts, mediated academic discussion, problem-solving in L2, and genre-based writing. The findings indicate that cognitive strategies serve as mediators that transform input-rich activities into opportunities for hypothesis formation, evaluation of claims, and conceptual restructuring. Effective implementations share four characteristics: explicit modeling of strategies with language-specific exemplars, task designs that require evaluation and justification, iterative cycles of prediction–verification–reflection, and performance-based assessment that captures reasoning quality rather than surface accuracy alone. The article concludes with practice guidelines and a research agenda for measuring the impact of strategy-integrated language curricula on transfer of critical thinking across contexts.  

Critical thinking, cognitive strategies, metacognition, foreign language teaching

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