A Study On Critical Thinking Assessment System Of College English Writing From The Perspective Of Hierarchy Model

Critical Thinking Skills(shortened as CTS) have become an important subject which attracts great attention from scholars both at home and abroad. Researches on CTS have gradually moved towards internationalization and localization, with the application of Socratic Questioning in the west,the construction of critical thinking hierarchy model and the design of assessment instrument in China. The critical thinking hierarchy model raised by Wen Qiufang gains wide attention in the field of foreign language teaching with its intuition and operability, thus it is worthy of reference in this thesis. However, considering the domestic research situation, it is easy to find that although the theoretical studies on CTS are comparatively mature, empirical studies based on authentic corpus from class are rare. Furthermore, research subjects in previous studies are mainly chosen from English majors with few of them focusing on college English teaching. Thus, the author decides to conduct an empirical study by penetrating into classrooms to collect and analyze authentic data. English writing is an intensive activity that requires high-level thinking, from thinking of a title to working out the framework, to writing and to revising. Therefore, it is safe to say that English writing is the best joint to combine CTS and concrete courses.Taking two natural classes of freshmen non-English majors from North China Electric Power University as the research subjects, this thesis attempts to reform the current assessment system of college English writing by integrating the evaluation of students' CTS into it. The specific research methods include qualitative analysis and quantitative analysis.Through the analysis of the collected first-hand linguistic data, the following five conclusions can be achieved. First, college students have possessed certain degree of critical thinking disposition which are not strong enough yet. Second, the design of writing tasks does influence students' application of CTS by comparing the test results of the two classes. It shows that the concrete and properly designed writing task can inspire students' CTS, while the simple and vague writing task will limit the development of students' CTS in their English writings. Third, college students' CTS and their English writing proficiency are significantly and positively correlated with each other. Fourth, integrating the evaluation of students' CTS into the college English writing assessment system will improve students' English writing from the following aspects: logicality of the content, emotional resonance and readers' awareness. Finally, the author gives some pedagogical suggestions for strengthening students' English writing competence that teachers should combine the cultivation of CTS into the teaching of college English writing. To be more specific, teachers are expected to equip themselves with the knowledge of CTS from the selection of topics to revising and only in this way, can they have the ability to guide and encourage students to apply CTS to their English writings.