Application Of Cooperative Inquiry Model In Cultivating Critical Thinking Competence Of Postgraduate English Majors

Critical thinking, as a kind of thinking activity, aims to cultivate people's spirit of criticism and inquiring, independent and opening thought, confidence, and curiosity. Since the 20th century, how to improve the students'critical thinking competence has always been the hotspot of western higher education reform. Higher education in our country also plays a high value on the cultivation of critical thinking competence in recent years.It is a usual phenomenon in China that the research capacity of postgraduates is low, and critical thinking competence is the core of research capacity. English majors teaching has been placing little emphasis on the cultivation of students'critical thinking competence, and the kind of phenomenon has drawn many scholars'attention. Most of the postgraduate English majors'undergraduate course is English, and even though they did well in studying in their undergraduate years, they lack in the competence of critical thinking. Nowadays, both domestic and foreign studies on the critical thinking competence mainly focus on English major undergraduate teaching, but few articles reported cultivating critical thinking competence of postgraduate English majors.In order to explore the cultivation of critical thinking competence of postgraduate English majors, quantitative analysis and qualitative analysis are combined in the paper. A questionnaire survey was administrated to 390 postgraduate English majors and 14 were interviewed. The questionnaires and interviews indicate that the postgraduate English majors think the teaching methods are outdated, the teaching materials are outmoded, and the teaching assessments are unreasonable.These problems in English major postgraduates teaching seriously affect the development of the students'critical thinking competence. Directing at these existing problems, this paper attempts to frame a teaching model of cooperation and inquiry and applies it to the course of Research of Learning Strategies of foreign Language Learners. The theoretical foundation of cooperative inquiry model includes inquiry-based learning, cooperative learning, and group dynamics. Cooperative inquiry teaching refers to the kind of teaching style inspired by the teacher, the students work together to inquire a subject. The teaching style provides students with opportunities to express freely, question, inquire and discuss. As the tutor, the teacher's task is to create inquiry context and lead the students to find, ask, analyze and solve the problems. As the classroom-hosts, the students should think over problems, communicate about the inquiry and summarize the result of inquiry. Cooperative inquiry model creates a research cycle, that is, the research process repeats these three stages at each cycle with deepening experience and knowledge of the initial proposition, or of new propositions, at every cycle. The students obtain the sense of achievement and the self-confidence in the process of inquiring. So they can have a tremendous enthusiasm for learning, cooperating, inquiring, establishing a good cognitive structure and prompting the ability of critical thinking. Meanwhile, the assessment exists in the whole process of inquiry and forms a holographic dynamic assessment system.The aim of the research was to increase postgraduate English majors'critical thinking competence in the teaching. The author believes that applying the cooperative inquiry model, which is carried by academic foreground, to the teaching of English major postgraduates is feasible and efficient.