On Normal University English Majors’ Critical Thinking Ability Development

At present, education modes and teaching systems for English majors in our colleges anduniversities are facing a new round of adjustment and reform, and the development of theteaching practice calls for the innovation and further development of theories of teaching. Theinsufficiency in critical thinking skills of English majors has become a hot issue in teachingreform for English majors, and the development of such skills has been warmly discussed inmany top national academic conferences. In this background, this study selected normalschool English majors’ critical thinking ability as the research object to investigate the presentsituation of their related skills and find out the elements that hinder the development of theseabilities and come up with the solutions. The investigator hopes that the study can providevaluable reference to the reform of education modes for English majors in our colleges anduniversities.This study took for the investigation subject one hundred and twenty third-year normalschool English majors and six teachers that taught the course of Advance English in theDepartment of Foreign Language&Literature, Minnan Normal University, and the surveylasted about one semester. In order to make the study results more valid and reliable, thisstudy makes a combined use of methods of literature research, questionnaire method andinterview, observation and statistical analysis.This study, based on the questionnaire survey of third-year normal school English majorsand the interview with some of these students and related teachers, finds that the students’critical thinking skills were at a low level, and with the credibility of95%and the pass rate of47.5%~45.9%, their average score of critical thinking skills ranged from56.628to60.022,indicating both low average score and low pass rate which were associated with the lowachievers who took up more than half of the total. In the six skills tested, the explanation skilland the evaluation skill were at a low level, the interpretation skill was the worst, and theinference skill and analysis skill were relatively better. With regard to this case, this paper putsforward some suggestions on the basis of the corresponding countermeasures for to thestudents, teachers and educational institutions concerned as follows:I. The teachers concerned should strengthen their study and research of the relevanttheories and practices of critical thinking;II. The teachers concerned should get rid of the students’ negative mentality inpresenting wrong answers or raising questions;III. The teachers concerned should cultivate positive group psychology and relaxedclassroom teaching atmosphere; IV. The students concerned ought to pay close attention to the development intheir own critical thinking skills;V. The students concerned ought to enhance their ability in autonomous learning andhabit of thinking actively;VI. The educational institutions should establish the evaluating system and testing modefor measuring the students’ critical thinking skills.