The Influence Of English Major Graduate Students’ Critical Thinking Skills On Their English Writing Process

Critical thinking(CT), as an important thinking ability for graduate students, has become the research focus in some western countries in the 1960 s. As the Quality Education was implemented, more and more researchers in China began to pay attention to critical thinking.English writing is considered to be one of the most effective ways to reflect students’ thinking,because writing process is not only an organizational process of words, phrases and sentences but also a complex process, including understanding the topic, developing the statement,organizing a coherent discourse and putting ideas into writing. In the present study, the researchers pay more attention to the correlation between critical thinking ability and writing proficiency and the subjects involved graduate students are relatively few. To cover the shortage,this study is intended to make a research on the influence of English major graduate students’ critical thinking skills on English writing process and tries to put forward some useful suggestions to cultivate critical thinking skills and to improve English writing teaching.In this study, the subjects involved were 90 English major graduate students from a comprehensive university in Shandong province. The WGCTA(Watson-Glaser Critical Thinking Appraisal) was adopted to evaluate participants’ critical thinking skills. Then the writing task and evaluation standard of Wen Qiufang and Liu Runqing were adopted to test the participants’ English writing process. The SPSS 20.0 was used to take correlation analysis and regression analysis to test the influence of critical thinking skills on four English writing process. The participants were divided into three groups based on the scores of sub-process. One-way ANOVA was used to test whether critical thinking skills had significant difference on different groups.After the research, three students were invited to take a semi-structured interview.The major findings were as following:Firstly, English major graduate students’ critical thinking skills have the following characteristics: 1) From the point of level of critical thinking skills, compared with the evaluation standard of Waston and Glaster, no participant reached high level. Only 23% of the participants could be seen as middle level. And the rest were weak in critical thinking skills. 2) From the point of the scores of critical thinking skills, participants’ maximum score was 58 point and the mean score was 46 point(The total point was 80 points). 3) From the point of the five critical thinking sub-skills, the maximum scores and mean scores of recognition of assumptions and interpretation were much higher than the other three skills. The maximum score, minimum score and mean score of drawing inferences were the lowest.Secondly, the results of correlation analysis between critical thinking skills and writingprocesses were as following: Critical thinking skills had positive correlation with the total score of English writing process(r=.616) and had positive correlation with the four English writing processes-understanding the topic, developing the statement, organizing a coherent discourse and putting ideas into writing(r=.611,.539,.560 and.516).Thirdly, the influence of critical thinking skills on writing process were as following: 1) The total scores of writing process were influenced by critical thinking skills to the extent of 38%(R2=.380). Besides critical thinking skills had significant positive influence on four writing processes(R2=.261,.291,.313 and.266). Among the four English writing processes, critical thinking skills had more influence on developing the statement and organizing a coherent discourse and least influence on understanding the topic. 2)The One-way ANOVA results showed that the difference of influence among three groups was significant.The research results above were supported by the result of interviews. The interviewees didn’t understand critical thinking skills completely. And they said that the inference part in the questionnaire was the most difficult and they spent least time in understanding the topic.This study will help teachers lay more emphasis on cultivating English major graduate students’ critical thinking and improve students’ writing proficiency through the four English writing process more specifically. At the same time, there were some limitations for the study.The number of subjects was too small and the gender difference was neglected. Besides, the writing task was finished after class. All these problems needs to be solved in later studies.