Impact Of Inquiry-based Learning On College Students' Critical Thinking Dispositions And English Achievement

Critical Thinking (CT) plays an important role in the integrated development of college students. Although critical thinking has drawn much attention in the field of medical training and science teaching at home and abroad, when it comes to the foreign language teaching, there are few studies presented in this field, especially the empirical research. On the other hand, inquiry-based learning is a new kind of teaching method to facilitate the students'subject learning and thinking ability. This study was designed to discover whether inquiry-based learning could improve students'critical thinking disposition and English achievement compared with traditional teaching approach.76 freshmen from a local university were randomly selected and allocated into the treatment group and the control one, in which inquiry-based learning and traditional teaching model were conducted respectively. The experiment lasted for one semester (18 weeks). The students were required to fill the Critical Thinking Disposition Inventory-Chinese Version (CTDI-CV) and take English proficiency tests at the beginning and the end of the experimentation. All the data has been analyzed by the statistical system (SPSS 13.0). The feedback from the students towards to the experiment was reflected by the interviews and diaries.The study reveals that:(1) inquiry-based learning can effectively promote college students'critical thinking dispositions, and the improvement can be found in all the seven subscales of critical thinking dispositions, especially, significant in critical thinking self-confidence, inquisitiveness and systematicity; (2) the improvement of English achievement can be found in overall scores of the English proficiency and the specific scores of the English tests and the significant difference was found in grammar vocabulary and practical English test; (3) students of high, medium and low achievement of English score show significant improvement in every section of English test throughout the experiment, especially, the students of L-group experienced a faster growth in the mean score of tests than the M-group and H-group. The mean score of H-group between the two tests underwent a relatively slower growth; (4) the students were in favor of the IBL approach. The IBL can facilitate the students'active learning and the self-directed learning; impel their learning style from passive learning to automatic learning; greatly enhance their enthusiasm towards to English learning and the self-confidence in learning English.To sum up, the inquiry-based learning has an advantage over the traditional teaching approach in boosting the college students'critical thinking disposition and English learning. This study furnishes some pedagogical implications for the current college English teaching in China. That is, IBL focus on active learning, stimulation of interests and inquisitiveness and self-directed learning which will be beneficial to the students'English learning and critical thinking.