The Development Of Critical Thinking Skills Through Public Speaking:A Case Study Of Chinese College EFL Learners

Critical thinking (CT) is considered one of the most important goals of modern education as well as being essential to citizenship. To date, researchers engaged in CT theory construction have reached some general concensus, yet there are major niches in the impirical studies concerning CT development through education:1) among the various factors impacting CT development, individual characteristics and human agency have received little attention;2) studies concerning foreign language learners are insufficient, and there is no comprehensive analytical framework for evaluating CT skills involved in specific EFL language learning tasks, such as public speaking;3) in face of the rigous exploration of CT evaluation methods in the global arena, most Chinese EFL teacher researchers have settled for"self-reported growth" as the the evidence for CT learning outcomes, leaving considerable room for improvement in terms of methodology.Taking Chinese college EFL public speaking (PS) class as an entry point, the current study stives to fill the niches above. Following her pilot study, during which the analytical framework,"The Critical Thinking Sub-skills in EFL Public Speaking", was constructed, the researcher conducted a participatory study by co-teaching a sophomore PS class at a Chinese university. During the semester, data on6cases of indivicual learners was collected. Multiple-perspective CT evaluation (serial prepared speeches on optional topics, parallel impromptu speeches on given topics, and standardized CT pre-and post-tests) resulted in the depiction of CT developmental trajectories of these learners. On further inquiry, the researcher explored the various factors that have contributed to or hindered their CT development by analyzing classroom observations, reflection journals, and interviews from the perspective of Social Cognitive Theory (Bandura1986).The findings are as follows. First, within the naturalistic learning environment of prepared speech tasks, the learners achieved progress in multiple CT sub-skills in public speaking, such as audience analysis, research skills, evidence choice, and structural strategies, while the results of standardized CT tests and impromptu speech evaluation showed a rather small overall progress, the most significant being the preliminary analytical skills. Second, learners with similar starting CT levels demonstrated different trajectories of changes. They are therefore divided into three types of development-"sustained growth","limited growth", and "stagnated growth". Probing further into the data, the researcher identified goal orientation, self-efficacy, perception of social environment, learning strategies, adequacy of reflection, effectiveness of intrstructions, and starting cognitive skills etc. as the major factors impacting the learners" CT development. The learners who have achieved a virtuous cycle of "social-self" interation proved to be more successful in improving their CT skills throught public speaking practice. This paper ends with discussions on the significance, limitations and implications of the current study, with particular emphases on the complexity of CT development, the complementation of multiple CT tests, the CT-infusion instructions in the PS classroom, and the importance of considering individual characteristics in both teaching and research.