The teaching of English in the United Arab Emirates is based upon the communicative approach and aims to enable EFL students to employ language skills for communication purposes, as appropriate. Personal experience and the author's colleagues' observations, however, reveal that a number of EFL university students fail to achieve adequate communicative competence, which, in turn, does not qualify them to exploit the foreign language of English as required by their curricula as well as by today's world. Central to university education in the United Arab Emirates is critical thinking. It seems...