Research On The Development Of English Majors’ Critical Thinking Skills In English Writing

The Teaching Guide for Undergraduate English Major(2019: 11)puts forward more specific requirements for English majors.Critical thinking skills has been included in one of the requirements for English majors,and the cultivation of students’ critical thinking skills is also emphasized in teaching.As to English,writing ability is related with analysis,interpretation,inference,explanation,evaluation and so on,which can clearly show students’ critical thinking ability.Nowadays,researchers focus more on the cultivation and teaching skills of English majors critical thinking ability in English writing,but less on the factors which facilitate their critical thinking ability.Here are two research questions addressed in this study.1.How much do English majors develop their critical thinking skills during the English writing course?2.What factors facilitate the development?This research was based on the second-year English majors of Hunan University who took part in the English writing course in 2017.The number of subjects was 47,and the research duration was 14 weeks,mainly using the writing test and classroom observation method.First of all,there were three writing tests in this study,namely pre-test,mid-test and post-test.The adapted scale of Florida critical thinking skills was employed as the writing scoring criteria to score the three tests.The data obtained are analyzed by the repeated measures.Secondly,through classroom observation,it records the related factors of the development of English majors’ critical thinking skills in English writing.The major findings are as follows.1.According to the analysis of the pre-test,mid-test and post-test,English majors’ critical thinking ability of English writing has developed significantly.It shows that students’ critical thinking ability attained moderate level.The pre-test shows that they all started from moderate but low level without high level students.The mid-test shows that they stayed at moderate level with few high-level students.The post-test shows that though most still remain at moderate level with,there emerge many high-level students.2.There exists significant difference among the six items of the scale in the three tests.Based on the results of classroom observation and three tests,the factors were analyzed according to the six items separately.There are mainly seven factors,namely presentations before the writing course,teacher’s scaffolding,interaction,brainstorming,students’ knowledge,content knowledge in class and peer evaluation and teacher evaluation with students after writing exercises.This research shows that English majors critical thinking ability in English writing has developed based on some factors in the classroom.Therefore,it is recommended that the English writing course can have abundant activities and tasks which can be of great importance to students.