An Investigation Into Status Quo Of Critical Thinking In Senior High School Students' English Writing

The process of English writing is the process of visualizing thoughts.As an important way to train critical thinking ability,it helps to train students' critical thinking ability systematically.At the present stage,there is less research that uses senior high school students as research objects,most of the objects are college students.Based on this,this research focuses on investigating into the status quo of senior high school students' critical thinking ability when the students write English essays,judging the level of high school students' critical thinking ability,and analyzing the factors which affect students' critical thinking ability.This research explores the following questions:(1)What is the overall critical thinking level of senior high school students?(2)What factors are affecting the level of senior high school students' critical thinking ability?First of all,in the process of research,the unified English essays of 293 senior high school students are collected,and then the scoring criteria are determined by three teachers who are full of experience in the light of the total score and each dimension score of critical thinking skills.Based on that,the overall critical thinking level of students is judged.In addition,in order to further explore the students' critical thinking level,the California Critical Thinking Disposition Inventory is conducted by the researcher and 278 students are required to complete the questionnaire of critical thinking disposition.Besides,according to Delphi report as well as theoretical framework of critical thinking ability proposed by Professor Wen Qiufang,a teachers' questionnaire is designed to investigate the understanding and level about critical thinking ability of 67 senior high school English teachers in English writing.Finally,classroom observation method is adopted so as to deeply analyze the factors affecting students' critical thinking ability.SPSS 16.0 is used to analyze the collected data,involving descriptive statistics analysis as well as independent sample T test.The following conclusions can be drawn:(1)There is big gap to fill for improving the senior high school students' critical thingking ability in writing,which is supported by the statistics of 64.35% students' critical thingking ability in writing at a medium level,27.29% at a low level,and only 8.36% of senior high school students at a high level.(2)There are several factors that affect students' level of critical thinking ability.On the one hand,students' are weak in critical thinking disposition,which affects the development of critical thinking ability.The average value of students' critical thinking disposition is 248.92,which indicates that the students' critical thinking consciousness is relatively weak,and which affects negatively the development of students' critical thinking skills.On the other hand,teachers do not have comprehensive and profound understanding of critical thinking.4.48% of the teachers do not know the ability of critical thinking,55.22% of the English teachers not knowing very well,40.3% of the English teachers knowing quite well,and no teachers knowing the ability of critical thinking very well.This directly leads to the lack of high school English teachers' ability to cultivate students' critical thinking ability,which seriously affects the teaching effect in terms of students' thinking ability.