A Study On College Freshman’s Critical Thinking In EGAP Writing Program

Since Dewey developed the concept of "critical thinking", many scholars abroad have carried out a series of studies about improving students’ critical thinking skills in education field. In the1980s, critical thinking became the target of higher education programs in such foreign countries as the US and Canada. It has gained its widespread attention in China only in recent years. But there are only few studies about it in education field. Our traditional English teaching method pays much attention to the training of students’ linguistic knowledge and language skills but ignores the cultivation of students’ critical thinking abilities. In the process of skill practice, teachers often stress the importance of memorizing vocabulary and imitating skills rigidly, but neglect the students’abilities in analyzing problems and putting forward innovative solutions. Therefore, English writing teaching is affected by this and merely attaches emphasis to train students’ reading and writing skills. There are few studies which aim at systematically cultivating students’ analysis, synthesis, summary, comparison and reasoning skills while they are writing. Therefore, this study aims at designing some writings tasks and teaching strategies which can be used to foster college students’ critical thinking awareness and promote students’ all-round development.According to six critical thinking skills, this study was carried out by requiring students to hand in an argumentation. All participants in this study are non-English major college freshmen from a211key university. The revised version of Rubric forQualitative Critical Thinking Skills Instrument was used in this study. With quantitative and qualitative analysis, writing experiment is conducted within a whole semester to collect data concerning students’ learning behavior. Reading-to-write is used in experimental class while traditional method is adopted in control class. The writing scores by the experimental and control class were statistically processed by software SPSS19.0. And also the interview was launched in some of students in experimental class to assess students’ critical thinking abilities reflected in their writings.The final analysis indicated that EGAP writing model exerted a significantly positive influence in improving students’ critical thinking skills, especially in arousing students’ writing enthusiasm and critical thinking awareness. Compared with control class, students in experimental class made big progress in writing competence. In addition, this study put forward some reform proposals to the teaching of English writing. The study is of great value to instruct students to employ critical thinking skills in their writing.