A Study Of The Impact Of Non-english-major Graduate Students’ Critical Thinking Ability On Their English Writing Proficiency

English writing, as a significant output to express opinions and exchange information, isconsidered to be one of the most difficult skills in foreign language learning by foreignlanguage learners. However, at present, most of the teachers are still using the traditionalcramming method of teaching in English writing classes. They focus more on the indoctrinationof grammar and writing skills while they often neglect the cultivation of students’ thinkingability.Critical thinking, as an important thinking ability, has become the research focus in somewestern countries as early as in the1960s. But in China, it is in the past decades that criticalthinking has been paid much attention to and the research of critical thinking is much less. Inthe field of second language acquisition, quite few researches are linked with critical thinkingeven less the correlation between critical thinking ability and English writing. So far, there arevery few researches on investigating the impact of students’ critical thinking ability on theirEnglish writing proficiency. Moreover, most of the subjects involved in the researches areEnglish majors in the existing researches. Non-English-major graduate students’ writingproblems are often neglected. Hence, this study is intended to investigate the impact ofnon-English-major graduate students’ critical thinking ability on their English writingproficiency, and to put forward some useful suggestions to improve their critical thinking abilityand English writing proficiency.This study is conducted in Shandong Normal University. The subjects involved in thisstudy are non-English-major graduate students from a class. The students’ critical thinkingability is evaluated by the WGCTA (Watson-Glaser Critical Thinking Appraisal) designed byWatson and Glaser(1980), and their English writing proficiency is assessed with an argumentiveEnglish writing task. SPSS17.0was employed to analyze the data collected from the research.The present study is intended to find out the general characteristics of the critical thinkingability of the non-English-major graduate students; whether there is a significant correlationbetween non-English-major graduate students’ critical thinking ability and their English writingproficiency and whether the non-English-major graduate students’ critical thinking ability havean impact on their English writing proficiency. By the analysis of data, the major findings are presented as follows:The non-English-major graduate students’ overall critical thinking ability is in alower-middle level. They perform best in recognizing assumptions while performing worst indrawing inferences. And there is a significant positive correlation between non-English-majorgraduate students’ critical thinking ability and their English writing proficiency. The higher thestudents’ critical thinking ability is, the higher scores for them to obtain in English writing tasks.Non-English-major graduate students’ critical thinking ability and its subskills have asignificant impact on their English writing proficiency. Inference and evaluation of argumentsare the most important skills to develop the students’ English writing proficiency.Based on the above research, the author puts forward some suggestions on cultivatingstudents’ critical thinking ability and improving their English writing proficiency. At last, theauthor proposes some pedagogical implications of this study and presents some suggestions forfuture study.