A Study Of The Relationship Between University Students' Critical Thinking Ability And Their Reading Ability

English reading comprehension, aiming to evaluate learners' English reading ability, is found to occupy a fairly large proportion in nearly all popular high stakes English language tests. In recent years the university students' English reading ability has been a hot issue in China. However, a close examination of the present English reading teaching will manifest many problems lying behind it. Students are, more often than not, trained to accept the standpoints presented in a text without any analysis, discrimination, judgment or criticism. Seldom do students come up with viewpoints of their own or raise the awareness of critical thinking while reading, which will impair the sound development of their critical thinking ability.Critical thinking ability has remained the focus of a great many researches in western countries. In contrast, studies on critical thinking at home are relatively new and far from adequate, most of which are carried out in such research fields as psychology, logic and nursing while only a few touch on the field of second language acquisition. Though attempts have been made by some domestic scholars at finding out the relationship between critical thinking and second language acquisition, much emphasis is laid on exploring effective approaches to cultivating learners' critical thinking ability from the perspective of writing and speaking skills through empirical studies; whereas correlative studies centered on the relationship between university students' critical thinking ability and English reading ability are relatively rare. The present study is conducted with the purpose of investigating the relationship between the university students' critical thinking ability and their English reading ability, thus putting forward some feasible pedagogical suggestions on the development and enhancement of university students' critical thinking ability as well as English reading ability.Participants of the study are composed of seventy-five sophomores majoring in Educational Technology from Shandong Normal University. The Chinese version of the Watson-Glaser Critical Thinking Appraisal(WGCTA) is adopted to assess the participants' critical thinking ability and their performance on the five subskills of critical thinking. Then an English reading comprehension test which consists of six passages selected from PETS-3(Public English Test System, Level 3) is used to evaluate the participants' English reading ability. SPSS19.0 is applied to analyze the data collected from the two tests.Results and major findings based on data analysis can be summarized as follows:1. The university students' critical thinking ability, in general, is at a low and medium level; recognizing assumptions is the subskill university students perform best at while the least acquired one is drawing inferences. As for English reading ability, the university students exhibit an intermediate level on the whole.2. Significant and positive correlation is found between the university students' critical thinking ability and their English reading ability. All subskills except recognizing assumptions are also strongly and positively correlated with English reading ability.3. The university students' critical thinking ability, especially the subskills of interpretation, drawing inferences and recognizing assumptions, is an important variable in predicting their English reading ability. The conclusion can be safely drawn that the university students' critical thinking ability has a significant effect on their English reading ability.Based on the study, the author presents some pedagogical implications about fostering students' critical thinking ability, especially in the context of English reading teaching and learning. Limitations of the study and suggestions for further study are also put forward.