An Empirical Study On Critical Thinking Skills Of English Majors From Teacher-training And Non-teacher-training Specialties

Critical Thinking is an overall ability consisting of analysis, integration, reasoning,discrimination and judgment, as well as questioning and innovation. It is one of the standards to judge whether undergraduates are qualified or not and to indicate the possibility of success after their graduation.Therefore, it has drawn more and more attention. In order to meet the social demand for talents, many of the higher normal colleges and universities have set up Teacher-training and Non-teacher-training Specialties, but no relative research has been found yet. Hence, there is a need for an empirical study to see whether there are any differences on Critical Thinking Skills between undergraduates in different specialties.This study is a comparative one which takes on the 409 students between Teacher-training and Non-teacher-training Specialties in the 2011 th grade of English Major of School of Foreign studies in a certain normal university as subjects, and uses Wen Qiufang’s Critical Thinking Disposition Inventory and California Critical Thinking Skills Test to do this survey and test on the two aspects of Critical Thinking---Critical Thinking Disposition Inventory(CTDI) and Critical Thinking Skills Test(CTST), and employs a statistical software---SPSS as the tool to analyze the quantitative data from the survey and test. The results show that there is no significant difference between two groups of subjects in Critical Thinking Disposition Inventory(CTDI). Of all of the eight dimensions in CTDI, only the dimension of openness shows the students of Non-teacher-training Specialty are significantly higher than those of Teacher-training Specialty, and there are no obvious differences in the other seven dimensions, but the mean value of Non-teacher-training Specialty is slightly higher than that of the other one in most dimensions except analysis. The difference between them in Critical Thinking Skills Test(CTST) has still not reached significance, but the value of probability at 0.071 is very close to the standard of significance at 0.05. And the result of this research belongs to medium level in the normal, compared to the previous researches in China and the data provided by American CCTST manual. Meanwhile, there is a positive correlation between CTDI and CTST. Eight randomly chosen subjects were also interviewedin this study. As a result, all of the subjects interviewed agree that Critical Thinking is very important, and suggest that the university should attach importance to the fostering of Critical Thinking on curriculum setting and class teaching, which can provide us with more evidences on the analysis for the results.