English Majors’ Critical Thinking Disposition And The Corresponding Skills In Their Oral Production

Critical thinking is composed of two aspects: affective critical thinking dispositionand cognitive critical thinking skills. Since the early1980s, research in this field spreadinto China and soon drew great attention and aroused heated discussion in the fields ofnursing, education and psychology. As in the field of second language acquisition, therelated studies are still in its early stage. The previous studies mainly focus on Englishmajors’ critical thinking skills and the relationship between English majors’ cognitivebasic skills like writing and reading comprehension. There’s even a tendency of confusingcritical thinking disposition and critical thinking skills. As to the relationship betweenlearners’ critical thinking disposition and critical thinking skills in oral production, fewstudies have touched upon.Based on Facione’s research on the definition and classification of critical thinking,this study tries to explore the characteristics of English majors’ critical thinkingdisposition and their corresponding skills in oral production, and the correlation betweenthem, with special attention to the impact of different learning stages and languageproficiencies in these regards. Attempts are made to answer the following questions:1. The characteristics of English majors’ critical thinking disposition;2. The characteristics of English majors’ critical thinking skills in oral production;3. The relationship between English majors’ critical thinking disposition and criticalthinking skills in their oral production.Participants in this study are40sophomores and43seniors majoring in English in auniversity in Jiangsu Province. They took a questionnaire adapted from Peng Meici’s(2004) Chinese version of Critical Thinking Disposition Inventory (CTDI-CV), and anoral test. Besides, sophomores’ scores in TEM-4(Test for English Majors, Band4) andseniors’ scores in TEM-8(Test for English Majors, Band8) are considered as theirEnglish proficiencies. And five students were selected to participate in the in-depthinterview.Major findings of this study are as follows:1. Generally speaking, English majors’ critical thinking disposition is rather weak.As for the different dimensions, the sequence of scores from the highest to the lowest isInquisitiveness, Analyticity, Maturity, Open-mindedness, Critical Thinking Confidence,Systematicity and Truth-seeking. There is no significant difference between sophomoresand seniors in critical thinking disposition, while the difference between high achieversand low achievers is significant.2. English majors’ critical thinking skills in oral production are intermediate. Scoresfrom the highest to the lowest are: Evaluation, Interpretation, Analysis, Inference, Self-regulation and Explanation. Seniors get higher scores in critical thinking skills thansophomores, but this difference is not significant. Meanwhile, the difference of criticalthinking skills between high achievers and low achievers is not significant, either.3. There are weak but positive correlations between English majors’ critical thinkingdisposition and critical thinking skills in their oral production and the correlationsbetween several sub-dimensions are too weak to reach the statistic significance. Withrespect to the two learning stages, no positive and significant correlation exists betweensophomores’ and seniors’ critical thinking disposition and critical thinking skills.However, there exist certain positive correlations between high achievers’ somedimensions of critical thinking disposition and some sub-skills of critical thinking skillsrevealed in oral production.