A Study On The Cultivation Of Non-English Majors’ Critical Thinking Competency Based On The Production-oriented Approach

With the fierce international competition for talents,the cultivation of students’ Critical Thinking(CT)competency has been paid more and more attention by the nations and scholars.It has become a trend of teaching reform to integrate the cultivation of CT competency into college English teaching.The Production-oriented Approach(POA)is a foreign language education theory with Chinese characteristics,and CT competency is one of the key competencies that it advocates.Based on the POA theory and models of CT,this research explores the cultivation of non-English majors’ CT competency based on the teaching process of POA in college English reading and writing class.The aim is to answer three research questions:(1)How does the teaching process of POA affect college students’ CT dispositions and CT skills?(2)What is the correlation between college students’ CT skills and writing achievement?(3)What are the changes of students’ attitudes towards the teaching process of POA to cultivate students’ CT competency?Four non-English major teaching classes of Shenyang University,including104 students,are chosen as the subjects of the experiment.Students are divided into classes based on the results of the placement test at the beginning of their entry into the university,and students’ English language proficiency between each class is relatively consistent.The teacher and the teaching materials of the four classes are the same.The teaching experiment lasts for 16 weeks.After the experiment,the data of pre-test and post-test,questionnaires and interview is collected and analyzed by SPSS 19.0 software.This study draws the following conclusions:(1)After the experiment of one semester,the participants’ CT dispositions and CT skills are improved.In the aspect of CT dispositions,some participants who are ambivalent can change to positive inclination.Among them,the cognitive maturity and open mindedness of participants are improved significantly.As for CT skills,interpretation,analysis,evaluation,inference,explanation and self-regulation are improved,but the most significant improvement is inference and evaluation skills.(2)There is a positive correlation between the participants’ CT skills and their writing achievements.Therefore,the cultivation of students’ CT skills can effectively improve students’ writing achievements.(3)In the process of developing the students’ CT competency based on the POA,the participants change from passively accepting knowledge to being able to think positively and actively,being able to look at problems from different aspects,and being brave to express their different views from others.The improvement of students’ CT competency is relatively slow,thus it needs teachers’ long-term attention and training.In college English teaching,teachers can stimulate students to think actively and help them present productive tasks based on POA teaching process.