Exploring The Cultivation Of Chinese Learners’ Critical Thinking In College English Classroom Learning Community

In the field of English as a foreign language (EFL) teaching, critical thinking has long been regarded as a higher-order thinking skill, continuously receiving wide academic attention at home and abroad. Numerous researches have been conducted to study the development of critical thinking skills as well as their cultivation through teaching. Besides, in the western academic fields, the past few decades have witnessed increasing interest in the study of learning community in the concrete form of collaborative group discussions. Although lots of efforts have been made regarding the field of critical thinking and learning community, the study of the two fields in the context of College English class can be a new attempt since there has been no relevant in-depth theoretical and empirical research. As teaching of foreign languages in recent years in China overemphasizes the instruction of language itself, ways in which critical thinking and learning community might be interpreted and fostered have become urgent issues for scholars and practitioners. Based on the previous research efforts, the present study is an attempt to explore the cultivation of critical thinking skills in classroom learning community among the freshmen at Zhejiang University. To be more specific, this study uses quantitative and qualitative analyses to explore the reliability of Rovai’s Classroom Community Scale as applied in the Chinese classroom setting, the effect of cultivating students’ critical thinking skills, as well as the relationship between classroom learning community and learners’critical thinking skills.The results of the present study have given a new perspective on the application of Rovai’s Classroom Community Scale and indicated that classroom learning community had exerted certain impact on the cultivation of learners’critical thinking skills. Comparatively speaking, students in the experimental classes were found to make a great progress in the sense of classroom community and cultivate an advanced level of critical thinking skills during the whole research. Moreover, the follow-up interview showed that the classroom learning community in the form of collaborative group discussions has exerted certain influence on the development of students’ critical thinking skills and this new mode of cultivation was gradually accepted and put into practice. The present study has some implications for the cultivation of learners’critical thinking skills in the College English classroom.