The Cultivation Of Critical Thinking Ability In High School English Writing Teaching

In recent years,critical thinking ability has sparked heated discussions in the field of English education.Many experts and scholars acknowledge the important role that critical thinking ability plays in promoting students’ all-round development,and suggest that the cultivation of students’ critical thinking ability should be an important goal of the new curriculum standard.Writing is believed to truly reflect the students’ thinking process.Thus,it is important to cultivate students’ critical thinking ability in writing teaching.In view of this,some researchers have tried to integrate critical thinking into English writing teaching.At present,most of these empirical studies focus on higher education.There are few studies on the cultivation of critical thinking among high school students.Therefore,based on the constructivist learning theory,input hypothesis,and output hypothesis the three theoretical foundations,this paper proposes methods to cultivate critical thinking ability of high school students in English writing class.This study explores the following four questions:1.What is the overall status quo of high school students’ critical thinking ability ?2.Does the cultivation of critical thinking ability in high school English writing teaching help to improve students’ critical thinking ability? If so,which aspects have the most significant improvement?3.Does the cultivation of critical thinking ability in high school English writing teaching help to enhance students’ writing proficiency? If so,which aspects have the most significant improvement?4.How to cultivate students’ critical thinking ability in high school English writing teaching?A total of 95 students from two parallel classes in the first year of Chaohui Chunhui Middle School participate in the study.One is an experimental class with a total of 48 students and the other is a control class with a total of 47 students.A 17-week teaching experiment is conducted for students.Before and after the experiment,students in two classes are tested in California Critical Thinking Disposition Inventory,Watson-Glaser Critical Thinking Appraisal,and English Argumentative Writing Test.At the same time,the students’ writing texts are judged by two scoring standards,including: “The Criteria of Critical Writing to Assess Writing Content”,which is used to measure changes in the writing content,and the “Standards for English Composition of College Entrance Examination”,which is employed to measure students’ writing proficiency.During experiment,all collected information is analyzed by SPSS 20.0.The main findings are as follows:1.The overall status quo of high school students’ critical thinking ability is below the medium level.2.After the experiment,the level of students’ critical thinking disposition did not significantly improve,while the level of critical thinking skills of students significantly improved.Among all critical thinking skills,the improvement of students’ evaluation skill is the most significant.3.The cultivation of critical thinking ability seemed to contribute to the improvement of students’ writing proficiency.Relevance,clarity and breadth of students’ writing content significantly improved.4.All the activities are developed through the pre-writing,while-writing,and postwriting three stages.During the pre-writing stage,brainstorming,critical analysis,and group discussion activities can be applied to broaden students thinking;during the whilewriting stage,six thinking hats mode,Toulmin model and OREO writing structure could be applied to help students organize their thoughts in the process of writing;during the post-writing stage,students’ critical reflection could be promoted through peer review and self-revision.The above conclusion show that the cultivation of critical thinking ability in high school English writing teaching is effective,as it not only enhances the students’ critical thinking skills,but also has a positive impact on students’ writing proficiency and writing content.Based on the experimental research results,corresponding suggestions are put forward for the cultivation of critical thinking in high school English writing teaching.