A Study On The Factors Influencing English Majors' Critical Thinking

Critical thinking is the process of making judgments which involves affective dispositions and cognitive skills.It has been regarded as an essential higher order thinking ability in facilitating success in the knowledge-based economy in the new century.Also,it has been one of the consensus to put forward improving English majors' critical thinking as one of the most important educational objectives for foreign language education.Furthermore,English majors have been criticized for desperate deficiency in critical thinking.However,more empirical evidence is needed to find the specific status quo of English majors' critical thinking.Thus,it is necessary to explore the current situation of students' critical thinking and the factors influencing it,the data from which may be potential reference and practical direction for enhancing students' such ability.Therefore,this study primarily focuses on investigating English majors' critical thinking and exploring how factors like background information,course-related experiences,class-related and out-of-class experiences may contribute to their critical thinking performance.The study is conducted based on the framework of college influence on student learning(Terenzini et al,1995:26).The study intends to answer three research questions:1)What is the current situation of critical thinking for English majors?2)How do variables like students' personal background,course-taking patterns,class-related experiences and out-of-class experiences correlate with English majors' critical thinking?3)Within these variables which are the influencing factors determining English majors' critical thinking?As critical thinking comprises dispositions and skills,this study adopts CTDI-CV and CCTST to test students' critical thinking ability.All the data collected is analyzed by SPSS 19.0 in order to process independent sample t test,One-way ANOVA,the Pearson correlation analysis and multiple linear regression analysis.The survey results are revealed by the collected and analyzed data from 201 valid questionnaires from freshmen,sophomores and juniors.Furthermore,the Information Survey and follow-up interviews are employed to find more evidence on subjects' critical thinking abilities,and the relevant affecting factors.Below are the findings:(1)Participants in this university display positive tendency for critical thinking dispositions and moderate critical thinking skills.Their inclinations for open-mindedness,analyticity,inquisitiveness and maturity are positive.However,their inclinations for truth seeking,systematicity and confidence are just neutral below the least requirement for positive propensity.Also,they are average in the five sub-skills including analysis,inference,evaluation,induction and deduction.They are comparatively poor at analytical,evaluative and inductive reasoning skills.Furthermore,affective dispositions and cognitive skills are found to be positively correlated with each other.(2)The data shows that the four sets of variables have correlations with critical thinking ability with 11 correlated factors for dispositions and 13 correlated ones for cognitive skills.These factors are academic pursuit,native place,number of other liberal arts-oriented courses,number of science-oriented courses taken,English proficiency,self-perceived quality of learning,uses of library resources,active learning experience,number of non-assigned books read,topics of extracurricular reading and extracurricular activities etc.(3)Factors from the four sets of experiences including academic pursuit,active learning experience and number of arts-oriented courses are found to significantly contribute to the variance in critical thinking dispositions.Similarly,five factors including topics of extracurricular reading,English proficiency,and number of non-assigned books read,active learning experience and extracurricular activities are reported to account for critical thinking skills.Hence,there are 7 influencing factors determining critical thinking.Therefore,in foreign language education,apart from developing students' language competence and proficiency,measures should be taken to promote growth in critical thinking.Critical thinking interventions need to be conducted with focus on the influencing factors in account of the related factors.It is a dynamic process involving the joint efforts of institutes,instructors and students to make full use of course-related,class-related and out-of-class learning experiences.This study gives empirical data on the current situation of English majors' critical thinking ability,and the relevant influencing factors,which may contribute to the literature on foreign language research.Also,the survey result may provide some insight for enhancing students' critical thinking from four perspectives involved in the learning process.However,there are still some limitations like the limited number of participants at a normal university,the restraint of instrument and the incomplete influencing factors.Thus,further research may be needed to fill in the gap to provide more comprehensive and reliable results.