A Research On Critical Thinking Ability Of Non-english Major Postgraduates In English Writing

In the eighties of last century,lots of colleges in America and Canada began to regard critical thinking ability as a higher educational object.However,critical thinking arouses Chinese researchers’ interest just in recent years.Although there have been amount of researches about critical thinking ability,how to analyze their critical thinking ability from students’ compositions is still not adequately focused on,especially the researches of non-English major postgraduates’ compositions.Therefore this research attempts to figure out this issue.This research mainly adopts four methods,literature research method,quantitative analysis,qualitative analysis and questionnaire method,based on Stapleton’s assessing model of critical thinking.This research selects 124 postgraduates coming from four different majors in Guangxi University for Nationalities.First,each subject is requested to finish a questionnaire of critical thinking disposition.Then an argumentative composition whose topic is familiar to these students is assigned to each participant.Finally this research makes efforts to discover the relationship between critical thinking ability and English writing and explore the effects of critical thinking on English writing by analyzing these collected data.According to the collected data,the results illustrate that there is a positive correlation between critical thinking ability and argumentative composition scores.The stronger the critical thinking ability becomes,the higher the scores of argumentative composition achieve.Through analyzing the composition of the research,the results demonstrates that the high and middle proficiency groups are able to advance more reasons to stand bytheir own claims.The problems of these two groups are that most of the students just adopt the theoretical evidence of our common sense and precisely defining words.However,they seldom offer some rational evidence,such as facts,research studies and statistics to prove the claim.A few parts of the students have the multidimensional consideration of the argument and meanwhile propose their different understandings.Seldom they will recognize the opposition and put forward their oppositions.In the low proficiency group,fallacy constantly occurs.Most of them can not illustrate their own opinion logically and legitimately,and sometimes the former and latter sentences are always contradictory.For the coherence of the whole passage,in general,most of the students have the ability.The opinions of the first and last paragraph are consistent.They can present the concordant idea.All in all,for the non-English major postgraduates,the whole level of critical thinking ability presented in English writing is not relatively high.There will be a long way to cultivate students’ abilities of critical thinking.The purpose of this research is to provide some referable suggestions according to the result and offer some enlightenment to English writing pedagogy in the future.Through this research,The author also hopes that it will decrease the discrepancy existing between minority areas and other areas in China and at the same time reduce the disparity of language teaching environment and educational system between our country and other countries in order to realize the real object of English pedagogy in China and promote the ability of critical thinking in non-English major postgraduates.Hopefully these students can engage in their own professional work with the tool of English in the drastic environment of international competition and meanwhile make a contribution to the development and advancement of our country.