Cultivating Students’ Critical Thinking Ability

Critical thinking plays an extremely important role in study, research and work, it is notonly an important part of the skills in the21st century, but also one of the focus of theeducation in the future. Experts and educators in western countries pay great attention tocultivate students’ critical thinking ability, they regard it not only as an integral component oflearning, but also as one of the basic skills of thinking along with problem-solving ability. Inrecent years, both the education reform and the new curriculum reform in China put emphasison quality education as well as cultivating students’ innovation ability, and cultivatingstudents’ innovation ability is inseparable from the cultivation of critical thinking ability, forthat critical thinking ability is the core of innovation ability.Critical thinking includes two dimensions: critical thinking skills and critical spirit.Interpretation, analysis, inference and self-regulation are four basic aspects of criticalthinking skills. Being open-minded, being curious, being wise and seeking for truth are thefeatures of critical spirit. Neither critical thinking skills nor critical spirit is dispensable.While discussing the cultivation of critical thinking ability, many experts and teachers inChina mostly focus on higher education or adult education. In fact cultivating criticalthinking ability can be more meaningful at an earlier stage of basic education. As the mostimportant teaching resources, textbooks reflect the pursuit of educational value of an era.Textbooks are the basic references for teachers and students, the contents of critical thinkingability only be reflected in the textbooks we can encourage students to be good at questioningand thinking as well as motivating teachers to give better guidance to students on cultivatingtheir critical thinking ability.This study selected the English textbooks for junior high schools that published byShandong Education Publishing House and the English textbooks for senior high schools thatpublished by Foreign Language Teaching and Research Publishing House as the studyingobjects. The author mainly analyzed these two questions: whether our English textbooks forhigh schools can provide text materials for cultivating students’ critical thinking ability;whether our English textbooks for high schools can design practice activities for cultivatingstudents’ critical thinking ability. For these two questions, the author analyzed the Englishtextbooks for high schools and found that our English textbooks mostly emphasis on cultivating students’ ability of listening, speaking, reading and writing, neither the textmaterials nor the practice activities in the textbooks give more place to cultivate students’critical thinking ability. Based on the results for this study the author conducted in-depthanalysis and ultimately explored some strategies to cultivate students’ critical thinking ability,putting forward that the cultivation of critical thinking ability should be designed overall inthe textbooks, and we should strengthen it in the teaching contents’ organization andindividually design some thematic activities in the textbooks to cultivate students’ criticalthinking ability.