The Research On The Relationship Between College Students' English Learning Motivation And Critical Thinking Skills

"Critical thinking skills" was introduced from the West and many scholars translated it into '????' in Chinese.All the time,many experts and scholars in foreign language studies have criticized that the critical thinking skills of English major students were weaker than students from other majors in critical thinking skills in general and analysis,inference and evaluation in particular(He Qishen,1999).Therefore,many scholars called for the improvement of English major students' critical thinking skills(Wen Qiufang&Liu Runqing,2006;Huang Yuanshen,2008).However,according to the documents,the majority either investigated the status quo of critical thinking skills or attempted to improve the thinking skills in the classroom setting while there were few researches regarding the factors influencing critical thinking development and there was almost no research exploring the factors which may influence critical thinking skills from the perspective of psychology.Therefore,this study sought to explore the relationship between English learning motivation and critical thinking skills in view of foreign language learning psychology.A survey was adopted in this study to investigate the English learning motivation types and the critical thinking skills among 161 freshmen and sophomores who were Non-English major students from a university at Fuzhou of Fujian Province.The data collected were processed and analyzed by SPSS 13.0 and Excel.Canonical Correlation analysis showed that English learning motivation types and critical thinking skills had 7 canonical variable groups.Namely,different English learning motivation could stimulate the development of different critical thinking skills.For the students who had stronger intrinsic interests in English,their thought were more open;for the students who were in different English learning environment,there would be some change in their seeking the truth;for the students who were driven by instrumental motivation to learn English,there would be some change in their seeking the truth as well as open-mindedness;for the students who were driven by abroad motivation to learn English,there would be some change in their systematization ability and cognitive maturity;for the students who were driven by social motivation to learn English,they would make a difference in analytical ability and the sense of curiosity;for the students who were driven by achievement motivation to learn English,there would be an impact on their comprehensive critical thinking skills;for the students who were driven by individual development motivation to learn English,their self-confidence of critical thinking and the sense of curiosity would be changed.This study demonstrates that English learning motivation indeed has an important influence on critical thinking skills.So,in terms of either theory or practice,results are both exciting and significant.Theoretically,this paper not only clarifies the relationship between English learning motivation and critical thinking skills but also provides more theoretical evidence for further researches about what may influence the critical thinking skills.Practically,when teachers help students to improve language skills they should also lead students to establish new concept of English learning as to promote the development of the students' critical thinking skill.