A Tentative Exploration On The Teaching Approach To The Cultivation Of College Students’ Critical Thinking

Critical thinking has drawn much concern from scholars and researchers in theeducation field and they have conducted many studies on it. A variety of programshave been established in the western schools to train students’ critical thinking inrecent decades. However, there exists a void in the cultivation of students’ criticalthinking in College English teaching for traditional EFL teaching merely attachesemphasis to training students’ linguistic knowledge and language skills. Therefore,EFL teachers are required to adopt appropriate writing tasks and teaching approachesto foster college students’ critical thinking.At first, Qualitative Critical Thinking Skills Scale was revised to assess students’critical thinking abilities reflected in their essays, which would help instructors findout the characteristics and weaknesses of students’ critical thinking skills and designtargeted writing tasks to improve their abilities from all aspects.This study follows the essential steps of action research on the basis of CollegeEnglish writing teaching. The researcher discovered some problems in her ownteaching practice, made some reforms, put reformed learning tasks as well as teachingapproaches into practice and reflected upon the implementation and effectiveness.Text analysis, questionnaires and interviews are employed for repeated“action-reflection-action” and constant improvement. In the course of three-roundaction research, various writing tasks and teaching approaches and correspondingassessment methods are designed to aim at the cultivation of language proficiency andcritical thinking skills, such as inference, reasoning, classification, analysis andself-validation.Based on Constructivism, Cooperative Learning and Process Writing Theory, theresearcher attempted to adopt different teaching approaches like teachers’ writtenfeedback in the form of questions, peer feedback, self-assessment and brainstorming.In addition, various writing tasks, ranging from topic writing to pictorial writing,read-to-write to task-based writing, were chosen to nurture college students’ English proficiency and critical thinking abilities and diminish boredom in EFL writing.The results indicate that brainstorming at the pre-writing stage, peer feedback andteachers’ content-related comments are instrumental in promoting critical thinking,while teachers’ written feedback in the form of Socratic questions and self-evaluationhave little effect. With the shift of teaching focus from sheer language to thecombination of form and content, foreign language learners’ critical thinking abilitiesin analysis, evaluation, inference etc. have been improved after a period of Englishwriting practice. On the other hand, students are still short of awareness of reflectionupon their own thinking process.It is also found that college students’ poor performance of critical thinking skillsin writing has been improved by leaps and bounds in the study. Nevertheless, thisresult shows a departure from the common sense that the cultivation of criticalthinking must be a long and arduous process. As a matter of fact, English learners’critical thinking abilities would gradually improve regardless of the type of writingtasks, as long as teachers emphasized the significance of writing content, which hasdriven the researcher to further reflect on the existing examination system, assessmentstandards, and the focus of College English teaching. It is urgent to eliminatenegative effects of traditional language teaching that has already seriously blockedcollege students’ cognitive development in that it overemphasizes language form,ignoring writing content for a long time.Another problem arising in the study is obvious boredom in English writing.Students have become utilitarian under great external pressure of CET-4/6,employment and further study. They are reluctant to write in English after they weredriven to take repeated writing exercises mechanically, which extinguished theirinterest that can only be fueled by the inner thirst for knowledge. Therefore, theresearcher calls for holistic education that accentuates effective teaching methodsshould meet college students’ needs in language, cognition and affect simultaneouslyand suggests that exploratory writing tasks should be designed where novel andchallenging tasks may ignite and remain learning interest. Moreover, task-basedwriting has been introduced into the last round of action research based on the organic combination of process writing and product writing. It keeps learners writing andrewriting on the same theme, constantly exploring the same topic from differentperspectives. The greatest advantage of this type of writing task is to help learnersout of weariness, writing anxiety and other negative affects. Both linguistic formand writing content have been attached importance to during the entire spiral writingprocess. In order to take full advantage of this teaching approach, a variety ofmeaningful and authentic or quasi-authentic tasks need to be designed to cultivatestudents’ learning autonomy, after their psychological characteristics and cognitivedemands have been taken into account.