The Effectiveness Of Continuation Task On The Cultivation Of English Major's Critical Thinking Ability

Recently, critical thinking has always been the hot topic in teaching reform. Many studies claim Chinese students' critical thinking ability are quite weak and English majors' critical thinking ability are especially worrying. Given the situation, some researchers tried to introduce critical thinking into English teaching class. Until now, the majority of researches have focused on combining critical thinking with either reading or writing. However, up to now no studies have endeavored to combine critical thinking with both reading and writing yet. Continuation task, as a union of reading and writing, could fill the blank exactly. Thus, in this paper through empirical research, the effectiveness of continuation task on the cultivation of English majors' critical thinking ability was explored.To be specific, the thesis is to answer the following three questions:1. Will continuation task be an effective way to cultivate English majors' critical thinking ability?2. Is every affective sub-disposition in critical thinking improved? To what extent are they improved respectively?3. Is continuation task effective to every cognitive sub-skill in critical thinking? To what extent are they positively affected respectively?The subjects chosen for the present study are 46 sophomores from English major in Hunan University.7training sessions of continuation task are conducted. Before and after training, all the students' critical thinking abilities are tested: CTDI-CV(Critical Thinking Disposition Inventory-Chinese Version) devised by Peng Meici et al.(2004) is applied to test students' critical thinking affective disposition and UF/QCTS(Qualitative Florida Scale for Critical Thinking Skills) is applied to measure students' critical thinking cognitive skills. Then SPSS10.0 is used to analyze 36 valid data from two tests: pre-test and post-test of subjects' critical thinking affective disposition and cognitive skills. Finally, the main findings are obtained and presented as follows:1. Both of subjects' critical thinking affective disposition and cognitive skill got improvement to a significant degree through continuation task training. To sum up, continuation task is very effective in cultivating critical thinking ability.2. As for critical thinking affective sub-dispositions, 7 dispositions like Truth-seeking, Open-mindedness, Analyticity, Systematicity, Confidence, Curiosity and Cognitive Maturity are all advanced to a remarkable degree. Among of these sub-dispositions, Cognitive Maturity gets the least improvement.3. As for critical thinking cognitive sub- skills, 5 dispositions like Interpretation, Analysis, Evaluation, Inference, Explanation are all proved to be boosted to a significant degree. However, results imply that there is no significant difference between pre-test and post-test in Self-regulation. In another word, continuation task produce no significant effect on students' self-regulation skill.The results above turn out that continuation task can truly improve students' critical thinking ability including critical thinking affective sub-disposition and most cognitive sub-skills. In addition, the paper not only sheds some lights on the widespread use of continuation task but also provides further evidence for feasibility of critical thinking ability cultivation in English teaching.