By developing critical thinking skills, your students can overcome any linguistic, academic, and social gaps and prepare for the challenges of higher education. We need to implement a range of activities that develop and encourage critical thinking skills as well as engage students. Therefore, it is important that students have not only the language skills, but also the academic and social skills that today’s higher education requires. As a blended learning specialist, “she” has led webinars on critical thinking skills and assessment in the ESL classroom and has written a series of blog posts about critical thinking in the language classroom. Introducing students to the language of academic subjects early on can help build background knowledge and be very motivating for students who need more than just language instruction. So how do we bridge these academic, language, and social gaps? Let look at some techniques that can help students succeed in higher education. Second, our students take university courses where they are faced with two-hour lectures, 50-plus page readings, and content that is not as structured. In addition, their instructors often do not develop prior knowledge or support learning because they expect students to come to class with that knowledge. Language gaps can be related to content language, or informal language that students encounter when working with other students, or connotative and denotative meanings and word contexts. When students embark on activities, they are expected to collaborate with classmates, participate in group activities, negotiate, alternate, and express their own ideas in dialogue. Project-based learning requires students to collaborate with peers and be able to prioritize, negotiate, and delegate responsibilities. What does it mean to know the word? According to Paul Nation, a student must know: the spoken and written form, the parts of a word that have meaning, word forms and their meanings, concepts and vocabulary associated with a word, grammatical function, possible word combinations, case and frequency of word usage. This can be accomplished by creating classroom and instructional assignments designed to develop and practice critical thinking skills. EAP students are moving from highly supervised EAP courses to courses that require them to listen for 50 minutes and take notes or read more than 50 pages before class. And it is up to the teachers to make sure our students develop these skills, but some balance is needed.