A Study Of Critical Thinking’s Impact On English Majors’ Argumentative Writing

English writing, as a significant means to measure learners’ competence of language output, has been considered as one most difficult skill among the four basic skills of listening, speaking, reading and writing. English learners will encounter all kinds of problems in their writing processes. Argumentative writing, as the major genre examined and used in English standard tests and practical application, exerts a very significant influence on English major students. However, in our current English majors’ argumentative writing classes, most teachers still adopt the traditional "infusion plus imitation and training" model and they focus more on the indoctrination of language knowledge and writing skills while often neglecting the cultivation of students’ thinking ability.Critical thinking (CT for short), as an important thinking ability, has a tight connection with students’ English writing. Though there are many researches at home concerning the relationship between critical thinking ability (CTA) and writing, the research is extremely few when it specifies to the impact of English majors’ CTA on their English argumentative writing proficiency (AWP for short). The study attempts to explore this impact and searches for new methods to improve English majors’ AWP and it is hoped to offer some pedagogical implications and suggestions for the teaching and learning of English majors’ argumentative writing.Based on the existing theories and empirical researches on CT, this study chooses 3 intact classes of third-year English majors in the foreign language school of Central China Normal University as subjects and employs WGCTA (Watson-Glaser Critical Thinking Appraisal) and English argumentative writing task to respectively measure students’ CTA and their AWP. In order to explore how CT impacts English majors’ AWP, SPSS 18.0 and qualitative textual analysis are employed to analyze the data and texts.Based on both qualitative and quantitative studies, the following findings emerge from the data analysis:(1) Most English majors’ AWP is in a moderate level and most students’ CTA is in a lower-middle level and they perform best in recognizing assumptions and worst in drawing inferences. (2) There is a significant positive correlation between English majors’ CTA and their AWP. (3) CT exerts a significant impact on English majors’ argumentative writing and the influence is concentrated on the following four aspects:relevance, explicitness, distribution and reasoning, generally speaking, the stronger students’ CTA is, the better they perform in the four aspects and the impact is especially evident on reasoning.Practical suggestions for improving English majors’ AWP are put forward from the perspectives of English major writing teachers and students. It’s expected to provide some reference value for further researches. However, it should point out that there are still some limitations for this research and it requires further in-depth explorations.