Study On Non-English Majors’ Critical Thinking Ability Of Writing From The Perspective Of POA Theory

Cultivating students’ critical thinking ability is one of the core teaching objectives of higher education in China and an important research topic in university English teaching.The College English Teaching Guidelines(2020 Edition)explicitly incorporate the development of students’ critical thinking ability into the teaching objectives of university English.Writing is one of the most effective courses for developing students’ critical thinking skills.However,a common problem in college English Writing emphasizes the accumulation of basic language knowledge and skill training while ignoring the cultivation of students’ critical thinking ability,resulting in the phenomena of “empty content,low meaning,and a lack of fresh ideas” when students finish writing.In view of the importance of critical thinking ability in foreign language teaching,this research is based on the POA theory and theoretical models of critical thinking.It takes 72 non-English majors’ freshmen from Guilin University as the research objects and examines the development of non-English majors’ critical thinking ability via English writing teaching instructed by the POA theory through tests and faceto-face interviews.This research aims to answer the following three questions:(1)What’s the current situation of non-English majors’ critical thinking ability?(2)How does the POA teaching process impact non-English majors’ critical thinking ability?(3)What’s the relationship between non-English majors’ critical thinking ability and writing ability? This research lasts for ten weeks,and the data from the pre-test and post-test is collected,analyzed,and discussed by Excel and SPSS 27.0 after the experiment.This study draws the following conclusions:(1)The overall level of students’ critical thinking ability in writing is generally low.Among the three dimensions of critical thinking ability,meaning relevance scores are the highest,followed by topic understanding and content expression.Among the nine standards of critical thinking ability,students are best at fairness and worst at precision.(2)The English writing teaching instructed by the POA theory can improve students’ critical thinking ability.Critical thinking ability is composed of the content expression,topic understanding,and meaning relevance dimension.Students make progress in these three dimensions of critical thinking ability,with topic understanding showing the most significant improvement.Students make the most considerable progress in breadth out of the nine standards of critical thinking ability.(3)There is a positively correlated relationship between students’ critical thinking ability and writing ability.The better a student’s critical thinking ability is,the higher his writing ability will be.Based on the above analysis,this study has the following implications for cultivating students’ critical thinking ability in the process of teaching English writing:First,teachers should establish the right concept,change the traditional teaching mode of test-based education in the past,and add cultivating students’ critical thinking ability to the teaching task.Second,all aspects of writing instruction guided by POA theory are integrated with the development of critical thinking ability.Teachers can apply POA theory to English writing to develop students’ critical thinking ability.Finally,when incorporating the POA theory into English writing teaching,teachers should play good roles such as facilitator,organizer,and activity designer and use various methods such as debates,brainstorming,and Socratic questioning to guide students from simple to complex and gradually complete more profound thinking activities.