A Survey Of Speculative Skills In High School Students' English Argumentative Writing

English writing is a process of comprehensive output and a better manifestation of students’ critical thinking skills. No matter in higher education or for students’ future life, the training of students’ critical thinking skills is always important. But nowadays, high school English teachers are inclined to pay more attention to language skills and content structure but less attention to critical thinking in their instructions. Therefore, in order to investigate the current situation of students’ critical thinking skills, this thesis takes argumentative writing as the research object and analyzes students’ critical thinking skills based on the investigation results.Specifically, the investigation was carried out in a local Shanghai high school, and more than three hundred students are involved. By scoring students’ writing texts according to the scale and analyzing the texts, relevant statistics and text examples are analyzed in terms of students’ general critical thinking performance, the relationship between critical thinking skills and general writing levels, the influence of factors like gender, attitude and metacognition level. The results aim to provide suggestions about the instructions of writing for high school English teachers.Research findings indicates that high school students’ critical thinking skills are of average level and an imbalance is seen in the development of their specific thinking skills. At the same time, students with high level of writing tend to perform better in critical thinking. There’s also an obvious difference between male and female students in those skills and factors such as attitude, confidence and metacognition may contribute to this gap. Consequently, teachers may need to further reflect on the goal setting, the training of students’ critical thinking skills in different writing steps as well as students’ comprehensive thinking abilities in their writing instruction.