Inquiry Into Critical Thinking Problems In English Major Postgraduates’ Theses

Many scholars have found that most English major postgraduates in our country lack critical thinking abilities in recent years. They claims that English major postgraduates may face the problem of losing job in the near future, for their language skills are no longer an obvious advantage. Students’ lacking critical thinking abilities may become an obstacle to their ideal life. Since 1980 s western researchers have done some researches on critical thinking and now moved it from theory to practice field. However, studies in China about English major’s critical thinking skills have just begun to rise recently. It is found it is effective to cultivate the students’ critical thinking skills in reading and writing through development of teaching method and curriculum design.Although some researchers examine critical thinking skills through reading and speaking, others studies this issue through writing. Hu and Sun(2006)claimed that lacking critical thinking skills was very evident in students’ theses. This paper aims to investigate two questions according to the six critical thinking mistake models adopted from the book A Course in Critical Thinking to assess the critical thinking abilities:(1) Are there any mistakes same to critical thinking mistake models in the samples theses?(2)In what aspects have the English major postgraduates’ critical thinking mistake models mainly existed? In this study, 30 pieces of English major postgraduates’ graduation theses were chosen as samples with the keyword “English teaching” in CNKI. This paper evaluates the English major postgraduates’ critical thinking abilities in the samples. The result shows that English major postgraduates lack critical thinking especially in the aspects of data use, sample collection and question design. At same time this paper put forward several suggestions for cultivating critical thinking awareness and skills. There are also some limitations in this paper.