Teaching English Major Students’ Critical Thinking Skills Through Writing Tasks And Process Writing Approach

Critical thinking has drawn much concern from scholars and researchers in the worldwide educationfield and they have conducted many studies on it. A variety of programs have been established in thewestern schools to train students’ critical thinking in recent decades. However, there exists a void in thecultivation of students’ critical thinking in Chinese EFL. Especially for English major students, due to thedomestic traditional EFL teaching merely emphasizes training students’ linguistic knowledge and languageskills, English major students are interestingly compared like this “the Giant in language, but the Dwarf inmind”. However, in present advanced technology era, Chinese education should highlight the “LifeEducation” which means emphasize the balanced and comprehensive development of the individual.Therefore, EFL teachers are responsible to provide efficient tools to adopt appropriate writing tasks andteaching approaches to foster English Major Students’ critical thinking.This study applied quantitative research to explore whether different writing tasks and different writingapproaches have different influence for English Major Students’ critical thinking skill. According toConstructivism and Process-Writing Theory, the study designed2critical writing tasks: Writing based onthe Debate and Reading Feedback. Meanwhile, the study also applied traditional and non-critical writingtask----topic writing as the control group. Moreover, in order to prove whether process-writing method andtraditional product-writing method have different influence for students’ critical thinking performance; thestudy required students to respectively complete above3writing tasks with these two writing approaches.Before the teaching experiment, the teacher applied the CALIFORNIA CCRITICAL THINKING SKILLTEST and CALIFORNIA CRITICAL THINKING DISPOSITION INVENTATION to organize students tocomplete the pretest. After the teaching experiment, teacher applied CALIFORNIA CCRITICALTHINKING SKILL TEST to retest students’ critical thinking skills.The subjects of this study are third year English Major Students from3different classes studying inZhi Xing Collage of Northwest Normal University. The study required every class to complete one kind ofwriting task respectively and divided every class into two groups and one group students completed thewriting tasks with the process writing approach, another group student completed it with product writingtask. after13weeks’ experiment, the study made a2×3Two-Way ANOVA. The results indicated thatdifferent writing tasks have some positive influence for students’ critical thinking performance. But the datadid not indicate the significant difference among3classes. Meanwhile, the study proved that the process writing method can help students enhance their critical thinking performance in writing. Students whocompleted writing with process-writing method have better performance in critical thinking than studentswho completed the tasks with product writing method.(p<0.05) through comparing students Draft and Finalversion, the study further proved that the process writing approach are helpful to promote students criticalthinking in writing. Furthermore, through the face-to-face interview, the study mainly explored the reasonswhy different writing tasks do not make a significant influence for students’ critical thinking skills.Moreover, Students thought that the writing tasks in this study raised their learning motivation and writinginterest, to some extent. Furthermore, in the learner-centered learning process, they have more opportunityto exercise their critical thinking.However, as we all know that the cultivation of English learner’s critical thinking capacities must be along and arduous process. After further analysis students’ wring tasks, study still found more problems intheir critical thought. First of all, although students are capable of identify the main purpose, offeringsupplementary information to strengthen argument and evaluating alternative ideas, but this phenomenonare just confined to the present writing tasks and topics, this consciousness isn’t a stable process that occursat all the writing tasks. The study think that this phenomenon can explained like this: some obviousawareness of critical thinking knowledge has not necessarily transferred to the competence to use theseskills in an actual writing situation, as it is well known to teachers that the complexity of using certain skillsis far more difficult than the ability to understand this knowledge. The cultivation of a habit needs a gradualaccumulation and so does the critical thinking. Meanwhile, one’s growing process, particularly in cognitiveaspects, must be full of hardships and setbacks.