A Study On Correlation Between Critical Thinking Disposition And Academic Reading Ability Of Non-English Majors

As critical thinking (CT) and academic reading are two essential skills for college students, many researchers looked into them respectively. The lack of critical thinking among Chinese students has hampered academic reading in college, hence restricted their academic research.To figure out the status quo of college students’CT disposition and to explore the possibility of enhancing academic reading by fostering critical thinking, this study would investigate three questions:What are the levels, characteristics and differences of CT disposition development of non-English major college students from their freshmen year to senior year? What are the levels, characteristics and differences of academic reading development of non-English major college students from their freshmen year to senior year? Is there any correlation between their CT disposition and their academic reading capacity?This study is an quantitative research. Convenience sampling was used to select 144 participants (including freshmen, sophomore, junior and senior) from a non-English major of a key university of the ’211 Project’. Two instruments were used in this study: Critical Thinking Disposition Inventory-Chinese Version (CTDI-CV) (Yeh,2002) which was adapted the California Critical Thinking Disposition Inventory (CCTDI) (Facione & Facione,1992) was employed to measure critical thinking dispositions of non-English major students while the reading section of TOEFL iBT was applied to evaluate academic reading ability. Data analysis of this study, including descriptive analysis, item analysis, validity test, reliability test, and correlation, was done with the help of SPSS software.Statistics showed that:1) non-English major students scored low in overall CTDI-CV and all its sub-scales, indicating an deficiency in critical thinking disposition. Critical thinking disposition grew with class level as upperclassman students out-performed lowerclassmen; 2) they also presented limited academic reading capacity generally with sophomore students overshadowing all the other class levels; 3) Independent Sample T test showed that there was little statistically significant gender difference in critical thinking disposition and in academic reading ability; 4) negligibly low correlation was found between overall critical thinking disposition and academic reading ability, and the correlation was insignificant. Only among those who scored the highest can we find low but significant positive correlation between ’Analyticity’ disposition and academic reading.This study indicates that non-English major students are lacking in both critical thinking dispositions and academic reading. Small positive correlation between correlation implies that future research is needed to explore the correlation between CT skills and EAP reading ability.