Towards An Understanding Of The Intellectual Development In MA Students Of English: Five Case Studies

Recently more and more people express their concerns for English majors about their intellectual development and thinking abilities in China. Many people hold that English majors are inferior in thinking abilities and suffer what is described as an abstract thinking-absent syndrome. There is very little literature available concerning the current situation and development of English majors'intellectual competence. This necessitates further and in-depth research on this respect, especially in the way of case research.Structured on Raymond S. Nickerson'listing of abilities that can be used to describe and evaluate intellectual competence, and using logical analytical tools and drawing on Communication Accommodation Theory, the thesis describes and analyzes the intellectual competence of the subjects respectively, in terms of their abilities of deductive reasoning, inductive reasoning, classification and accommodation. The results demonstrate that the advanced language students have achieved much in their intellectual development– they fully utilize the above capabilities to achieve the assigned task. But the fallacies, errors and difficulties the students experienced in the debate lend support to the criticism of English majors, and the data would suggest that the students need further intellectual development.Case analysis is adopted in the thesis. These typical cases are drawn from a vast bank of data in the hope that the research would allow us to get a glimpse of the intellectual development of MA students of English in China.The thesis provides an analytical framework, a perspective for evaluating the intellectual competence of MA students of English, which proves to be plausible and workable in the research process.