A Case Study Of English Major Undergraduates’Critical Thinking Skills

Some educationists in recent years claim that most English major undergraduates in China lack critical thinking skills. They hold that English major undergraduates will suffer in their future employment because their language proficiency is no longer a conspicuous advantage and because their lack of critical thinking skills may become a barrier to successful careers.Domestic studies concerning English major undergraduates’ critical thinking skills have only gained their momentum in the last few years. Foreign research on this topic, which can be dated back to1980s, range from the theoretical framework of critical thinking, the development of assessment tools to pedagogical approaches involving the cultivation of critical thinking skills. Studies on the first two areas are mostly conducted by a group of specialists and require much time, which is impractical for a graduate student’s one-year research. The feasible studies usually focus on the development of students’critical thinking skills in reading and writing through improvement of teaching methodology and syllabus design.In some previous studies, a few scholars suggested that lack of critical thinking skills is most obvious in the graduation thesis, which reflects a student’s overall level of critical thinking. However, the scholars’assertions are mainly based on their own educational experience or general impression, which may contain certain degrees of subjectivity. The author of this thesis believes that the actual performance of critical thinking in the graduation thesis can be assessed with proper measurement tools and criterion of categorization. This research therefore centers upon the status-quo of the English majors’ critical thinking skills reflected in English major undergraduates’BA theses.The researcher of this thesis compared three models on critical thinking, respectively proposed by Facione (1990), Paul and Elder (2008), and Wen Qiufang’s team (2009). The comparison reveals that all the three models consider analysis, inference and evaluation as the basic elements of critical thinking skills. The author of this thesis, with the help of the three elements, made a detailed analysis of the students’critical thinking skills reflected by their graduation theses and offered some suggestions.In this research,30samples were chosen randomly from the68BA theses of English majors in Donghua University. By adopting the Holistic Critical Thinking Scoring Rubric (Facione&Facione,2009), the researcher assessed the holistic performance of critical thinking skills reflected in the samples. Their performances were scored by two individual raters. The score is labeled from4to1, respectively representing critical skills at the level of "Strong","Acceptable","Unacceptable" and "Weak"The results indicated that the students’ overall performance in critical thinking was unsatisfactory and that nearly half of them were considered unacceptable. The results were somewhat not at par with the scores given by the supervisors and the raters in that their judgments had been made based on the overall impression which includes language proficiency, thesis structure, research topic, creativity and academic guidelines apart from thinking ability. An analysis of the comments on the theses reveals that what attracts most teachers’ attention is language proiciency which to some extent either enhances or hinders the performance of critical thinking. A close examination of the theses and the scores reveals the tendency that those theses which show poor language proficiency also demonstrate weak critical thinking skills. It therefore gives support to the importance of language skills training in the first two years of English major study.After the assessment of the holistic performance of critical thinking, the researcher conducted a textual analysis of the samples to explore common problems relating to the students’ critical thinking skills in the theses, which hopefully will be of help to the cultivation of students’critical thinking skills. The findings from the textual analysis and the previous studies by famous scholars enabled the researcher to make some pedagogical suggestions on curriculum design, teaching methodologies and testing forms. Finally, in the last chapter the author of this thesis summarized her findings and mentioned a few limitations of the research and made some suggestions on future research in this field.