An Empirical Study Of Developing EFL Learners’ Critical Thinking Skills In The Integrated English Course

According to Dewey, the central purpose of education is learning to think. Toimprove her position in the global competition, China needs talents who are able to analyzeproblems, reason and think critically. However, educational researches have revealed thatthere are critical thinking deficiencies among Chinese college students. Fortunately, manyresearchers and educators in China have realized the importance of developing collegestudents’ critical thinking skills. The China’s Ministry of Education has put the goal of thedevelopment of critical thinking skills into The College English Curriculum Requirements,which stipulates expectations for the improvement of critical thinking skills among collegestudents. Most previous Chinese researchers in this area focused on the English majors andvery few studied how to develop the non-English majors’ critical thinking skills. Therefore,the present study is to explore whether there are any differences in critical thinking skillsbetween College English Students of liberal arts and those of science and engineering, toinvestigate whether explicit instruction in critical thinking in the Integrated English Coursecan improve the students’ critical thinking skills and their English learning achievement,and to study whether there are significant differences in the development of criticalthinking skills and English learning achievement between liberal arts majors and scienceand engineering ones as a result of explicit instruction in critical thinking.This empirical study has employed the instruments of tests and interviews. Onehundred and twenty six freshmen of non-English majors from a key university participatedin the study. The following research questions are addressed in the study:1. Are there any differences in critical thinking skills between College EnglishStudents of liberal arts and those of science and engineering? If yes, what are thedifferences?2. Does explicit instruction in critical thinking skills, as a supplement to theIntegrated English Course instruction, improve the critical thinking skills andEnglish learning achievement of College English Students, to a greater extentthan Integrated English Course instruction alone?3. Are there any significant differences in critical thinking skills and Englishlearning achievement between liberal arts majors and those of science andengineering majors following explicit instruction in critical thinking skills? If yes, what are the differences?The researcher’s major findings are summarized as follows:Firstly, the College English Students are lack of critical thinking skills and there areno significant differences in the critical thinking skills between liberal arts majors andscience and engineering majors.Secondly, all the participants improved their critical thinking skills and there is nosignificant difference in the critical thinking skills between the experimental groups andthe control group following a semester’s instruction, which indicates that explicitinstruction in critical thinking skills, as a supplement to Integrated English Courseinstruction, did not to a greater extent improve the critical thinking skills of CollegeEnglish Students, than Integrated English Course instruction alone. However, theexperimental groups made greater improvement in the English learning achievement,suggesting that explicit instruction in critical thinking has significant effect on the students’English learning.Thirdly, the researcher’s explicit instruction in critical thinking resulted in significantdifferences in critical thinking between liberal arts majors and science and engineeringmajors, and the latter improved their critical thinking skills to a greater extent than theformer. However, the explicit instruction in critical thinking did not result in significantdifferences in the improvement of English learning achievement between liberal artsmajors and science and engineering majors.The findings of the study can offer some implications to College English teachersfor utilizing effective methods in class to improve students’ critical thinking skills as wellas their English learning outcomes.