A Study Of English Teaching And Critical Thinking Of English Majors

In21st century, innovation is requested and encouraged. Critical thinking is the indispensable quality of creative thinking. And critical thinking skills are the premises and basis of innovative ability. Only with the critical thinking can people think profoundly and initiatively. And people can discover and invent new things. Otherwise innovation will be the castle in the air. Therefore, we must pay attention to the training of university students, which is also one of the key goals of quality education in China. In2000, the Ministry of Education of China published the "National English Language Curriculum for English Majors", which explicitly requires that teachers should cultivate students’critical thinking ability. In the1950s, the western countries represented by the U.K. and USA were full of enthusiasm about the research of critical thinking. In1980s, this concept was introduced into China. Researchers began to introduce and study about the conception and related theories of critical thinking. At present, the domestic research is still under the development. Researchers have not put forward the complete theory and reached to a common sense. Among them, the researches on English major students’ critical thinking are even less. Therefore, based on the existing research findings, this thesis explores the situation and cultivation of English major students’ critical thinking ability starting with the classroom teaching.First, the author summarized and elaborated the definitions, connotations, characteristics and value of critical thinking and the relationships between critical thinking and logical thinking as well as innovative thinking. Then after the study of domestic research on critical thinking the author proposed a new research question. The questionnaire showed that English major students in Taiyuan University of Technology were really deficient in critical thinking competence. At the same time, from the observation of eight English teachers’ teaching, this research indicated that the teaching methods of English teachers were traditional, which does not benefit to the training of students’ critical thinking. Then this thesis explained the following three teaching methodologies in detail. They are dialogue teaching, case teaching and discussion teaching. If teachers can apply these three methods into their teaching, to some extent, students’ critical thinking competence could be improved. Therefore, this thesis specifically elaborated how to carry out the critical thinking training in the intensive reading class and writing class, which could provide the basis for teachers’ class teaching in the future and better guide the teaching. In addition, the improvements of teachers’ quality and critical thinking ability are also quite crucial and significant.