An Empirical Study Of The Effect Of Theme-based CBI On Non-English-Major College Students' Critical Thinking Ability

Critical thinking ability refers to the ability of analyzing,reasoning,questioning and evaluating,whose role in personal development is getting more and more important with the social competition becoming fierce.College English,as a general course,shoulders the responsibility of cultivating students' critical thinking ability.However,long-term exam-oriented education focuses on imparting and memorizing knowledge,paying no attention to training students' ability to think critically,which objectively results in the “absence of students' critical thinking”.Theme-based CBI is a kind of teaching model that integrates language learning with themes learning.It regards students as the center of whole class and attaches importance to the development of students' critical thinking ability.By now,there are few researches on investigating the impact of theme-based CBI on non-English-major college students' critical thinking ability.Therefore,the study applies theme-based CBI to college English teaching in order to explore the effect of theme-based CBI on non-English-major college students' critical thinking ability.The participants involved in the study are eighty-two freshmen who major in Electronic Commerce in Shandong Youth University of Political Science.During the experiment process,the experiment class is taught under theme-based CBI model,while the control class is instructed through traditional teaching model.Critical thinking skills test designed by Yeh(2003)is employed to evaluate critical thinking ability of students both in the experiment class and control class before and after the experiment.Besides,College English Test Band 4 is also used to measure students' English proficiency before the experiment and divide the students in experiment class into three groups: high,middle and low proficiency group.Finally,SPSS 22.0 is employed to process and analyze the data collected from the experiment.The study mainly answers the following three questions:1.Dose theme-based CBI have an effect on non-English-major college students' critical thinking ability?2.Are there any differences among the effect of theme-based CBI on five subskills of critical thinking ability?3.Are there any differences among the effect of theme-based CBI on critical thinking ability of students with high,middle and low English proficiency?From the research results the author reaches the conclusions: Theme-based CBI has a significant effect on non-English-major college students' critical thinking ability,which to some extent can promote its development;The effect of theme-based CBI on five sub-skills of critical thinking ability is different and recognition of assumptions,induction as well as deduction get the greatest effect;There exist differences among the effect of theme-based CBI on critical thinking ability of students in different proficiency groups and students with low and middle proficiency improve more significantly than students with high proficiency do.Based on the above findings,the author gets the corresponding pedagogical implications,meanwhile,points out the limitations of this study and finally proposes recommendations for future studies.