Inquiry Into Critical Thinking Problems Of English Postgraduates’ Academic Writing Processes

In recent years, critical thinking ability has become one of the important standards to evaluate the current college students’ basic abilities. The national education reform and development syllabus has pointed that the long-term development of the education is to promote students’ comprehensive developments and to cultivate their independent creative thinking spirit. While, it is a common fact phenomenon that focusing more on cultivating students language skills than their critical thinking abilities in our national English teaching processes. It is an acknowledged fact that our English major students lacked of critical thinking abilities in English academic writings. For English postgraduates, English academic writing is the professional representation of their research achievements. Critical thinking ability is one of the important factors to influence the qualities of English academic writings.This thesis took the case study as its main research methodology. The literature method, comparative method and interview method were used as well. It recorded the critical thinking difficulties occurred in the whole English academic writing processes of the four English postgraduates from Haerbin Normal University by converting their recordings to texts. Meanwhile, the writer’s own academic writing experience was recorded as well. All the data were converted from the audio records into texts. The research discussed the following questions: 1. Whether English postgraduates had any critical thinking problems in their academic writing processes or not? 2. What were these specific critical problems? 3. What were the reasons contributing to these problems? 4. How to solve these problems? On the basis of these problems, it found that the English postgraduates had encountered critical thinking obstacles in different degrees during their academic writing processes including selecting topics, literature reviews, research methodologies, data collections and analyses, research results and other aspects. According to the various critical thinking dimensions of affective strategies and cognitive strategies, the research analyzed the reasons that might cause these difficulties from the aspects of English postgraduates’ critical model constructions, curriculum designs and assessments separately. At the same time, this study intended to put forward some effective strategies to cultivate the English postgraduates’ critical thinking abilities in their English academic writings from the above aspects. It would like to provide some references for English postgraduates to improve their academic writing qualities.