A Study On Cultivating Critical Thinking Ability Of English Major Students In Reading Instruction

Nowadays, studies on the cultivation of critical thinking ability have raisedgreat attention in the educational field at home and abroad. However, in Chinaempirical researches on the cultivation of critical thinking are few, especially incollege English education. Traditional English education attaches more to thedevelopment of language skills rather than thinking skills, which leads to serious“thinking absence” of English majors. Therefore, it is necessary to make anempirical research on how to integrate critical thinking cultivation into EFL.It is generally accepted that critical thinking ability covers critical thinkingskills and critical thinking dispositions, however, most critical thinking trainings areconducted only based on critical thinking skills. Therefore, based on Richard Paul’scritical thinking framework, this study attempts to construct a training modeltargeted at critical thinking skills and integrates this model into English readingcourses to foster English majors’ critical thinking ability. The study selected45thirdyear English majors to do the training. After the training, the study seeks to find out(1) what the effects of the training on students’ critical thinking skills are;(2) whatchanges of students’ critical thinking dispositions after the training of targeted skillsare. Watson—Glaser Critical Thinking Appraisal, writing test and Critical ThinkingDisposition Inventory-Chinese Version survey are used as instruments to makeassessments on skills and dispositions respectively. SPSS19.0is used to do suchstatistical techniques as Descriptive Statistics, Independent Samples T-test and Paired Samples T-test for analyzing raw data and finally, the study gets conclusionsas follows:First, through the training, students’ critical thinking skills improve a lotespecially in subscales of inference and evaluation. Second, the training of targetedskills implicitly influences students’ critical thinking dispositions, but the positiveeffects are not so obvious as those of skills. According to above results, the studysuggests that in order to promote the cultivation of critical thinking, Englishinstruction materials and methodologies should be connected with issues of students’cognitive development. Meanwhile, students themselves should change traditionalEnglish learning attitudes and habits, forming a self-directed and critical inquiry.