A Study On Teaching Approaches To Cultivating Critical Thinking Of College Students

With the globalization of economy in the world, the focus of the competitionamong countries has been transferred to the cultivation of talents. Cultivating thetalents with innovative spirit and ability has been one of the main goals of worldwidehigher education. Critical thinking is the precondition and basis of innovative thinkingwhich is characteristic of innovative talents. Therefore, the cultivation of criticalthinking is of great significance. Critical thinking may be cultivated throughmultidiscipline and many courses. College English, as a compulsory course in mostcolleges, occupies the most class hour and involves the most college students.Therefore, English teachers should take their own responsibility of cultivating criticalthinking in College English teaching.Existing researches in our country focus more on theory introduction and scaledesign, relatively less on empirical and systematic study. Theory introduction andscale use separately offer clear definition and existing problems. How to solve theseproblems becomes the core part in this study. Aiming at the present situation thatcollege students lack critical thinking abilities, this dissertation is written to argue andexplore the approaches to cultivating critical thinking.Action research methodology and task-based teaching approach are used in thedissertation. By categorizing the tasks and evaluating the difficulty degree, the studyexplores different approaches to cultivating different thinking abilities. Through a lotof field work and data analysis, this dissertation has made deep exploration andproduced some arguments of innovative and academic values:1)Research content: The core part of the research is the approaches to cultivatingcritical thinking abilities. Compared with existing researches on theories andpatterns, this study focuses more on practice and application. Based onprogressive difficulty of tasks, the critical thinking abilities such as interpretation,analysis, evaluation, inference and self-regulation, start to be cultivated step bystep. This research turns to be significant. 2)Research methodology: The traditional action research process is composed offour stages which are planning, action, observation and reflection. Throughreflection after each round action research, the problem will be found out. Basedon this problem, new plan will be made for the next round. But in this dissertation,the new plan is made based on the combination of the problem arising in theprevious action research and the objective of the following action research, thewhole action research tends to be spiral. These stages are usually cyclical and areoften presented spirally.3)Teaching approach: The research builds the structure of code complexity,cognitive complexity and communicative stress to evaluate task’s difficulty degree.In line with the result, we make the task plan. To achieve the thinking abilitieswith the increase of task difficulty, the research combines the gradient-type tasksfrom easy to difficult with the gradient-type thinking abilities from simple tocomplex.4)Evaluation method: Being extremely abstract and complex, thinking, impossiblyand difficultly, can be accurately evaluated. Therefore, the research mainly takesqualitative description to make the rough evaluation and partly takes quantitativeevaluation. These methods are observation, interview, diary, questionnaire,feedback and scale. In the qualitative evaluation, we set a framework withobservation points of tasks.This dissertation is composed of eight chapters: Chapter One is written to have ageneral review of research background, situation and significance. The main objectiveof higher education is the cultivation of innovative talents whose fundamental qualityis critical thinking. Therefore, the research on approaches to cultivating criticalthinking is of great significance. Chapter Two is written for a general review ofcritical thinking from perspectives of philosophy, psychology and education. Based onthat, this chapter tries to explore some developing trend of theories and relatedresearches home and abroad in support of the present study and points out limitationand space for further study. Chapter Three is devoted to the design of the research,including the research methodology, approaches, subjects, instruments, content, evaluation, etc. The study will conduct3action researches based on differentcategories of tasks in the course of Business English Teaching. Chapter Four offers apilot research to define the present problem that college students’ critical thinkingabilities are poor. What approaches are effective to cultivate these abilities is the corepart in the study. Chapter Five is devoted to the first round action research. Fourdeclarative tasks are made to cultivate interpretation ability which is fundamental incritical thinking abilities. Chapter Six is written for second round action research. Inthis round, two categories of tasks in specific context, case-analysis task andproblem-solving task, are made to cultivate analysis ability and inference ability.Chapter Seven is composed for the third round action research. Two project-basedtasks in non-specific context are done to cultivate comprehensive critical thinkingabilities. Chapter Eight is the conclusion. This study has some findings andimplications for English teaching and talents cultivation in the future.This dissertation is composed of eight chapters. Each chapter can beindependently established, but also correlated to other chapters in logical sequence,offering a deep, tentative and exhaustive exploration into the cultivation of collegestudents’ critical thinking. This exploration is, undoubtedly, of great significance toour present foreign language teaching, especially to the cultivation of the innovativetalents in higher education. The major arguments made in the dissertation are of someinnovative and academic value for references.