Assessment Of Critical Thinking Abilities Of English Majors

Critical thinking (CT) is considered as a very important thinking skill in many fields, such as philosophy, psychology and education. Researchers from various fields try to focus on different aspects of critical thinking. Some focus on the disposition part of critical thinking while some focus on the skills of critical thinking. However, in the field of second language acquisition, critical thinking is still an unknown field waiting to be explored. With the introduction of widely accepted definition of critical thinking, learners will be able to analyze all kinds of problems critically and promote their critical thinking ability self-consciously. Critical thinking definition and various assessment tools will provide teachers with enough tools to assess students' critical thinking ability and find their weaknesses in the students' critical thinking in order to foster their ability from all aspects.The purpose of this study is to describe the critical thinking ability of English majors. Based on the definition presented in the Delphi report, Qualitative Skills Instrument will be modified to explore English students' ability of critical thinking and to use students' writing to assess their critical thinking ability and the developmental pattern of critical thinking possessed by English majors. The purpose of this study is to answer the following research questions:1). What are the characteristics of the critical thinking skills of English major students?2). Are there any significant differences in the critical thinking skills of students from different grades?The subjects of this study were 83 students of English majors from a key Normal University. 42 were first-year students and 41 were senior students. They took part in an English writing competition and their essays were used as the research data in this study.With this scoring standard provided by the Qualitative Skills Instrument, three experienced English teachers were trained to reach high inter-rater reliability among them. Writings of Grade One and Grade Four students were all scored by them. Then the scores rated by the three raters were averaged to reach the final score.With the final score, firstly SPSS was used to do frequency analysis. The results of each CT skill were described and analyzed for each grade. Secondly, SPSS was used to do the Chi-square analysis to discuss whether there was any significant difference between the two grades. The results show that 1) there are certain subskills of critical thinking that both grades are good at; 2) there are still certain subskills that both grades are not good at; 3) not all subskills can be developed after 4-year education.Chapter 1 introduces the necessity and purpose of the study. Chapter 2 gives the definition of critical thinking and critical thinking skills. Chapter 3 presents the research methodology, including the participants, assessment tool and the inter-rater reliability. Chapter 4 discusses the results skill by skill, and the possible reasons for these similarities and difference between the two grades. In chapter 5, the implication and the suggestions for further studies are put forward.