The Correlation Study Between Critical Thinking Ability And English Continuation Task Of Senior High School Students

Reading and writing,as a way of testing language ability,are closely related to thinking,and the process of reading and writing is the process of thinking.Continuation task,as a new type of writing,observing both students' reading and writing ability,became one of the new types of college entrance examination in Zhejiang Province.Critical thinking ability,as one of the important abilities of thinking ability,is closely related to reading and writing.In recent years,foreign language classes in primary and secondary schools also emphasize the cultivation of students' thinking ability.Therefore,it is beneficial to observe critical thinking in continuation task writing.At present,teachers are encouraged to cultivate students' thinking ability in teaching foreign language.But in real classes,especially in senior high school classes,teaching still maintains the simple input of words and grammar.Most senior high school English teachers pay too much attention to the teaching of language knowledge and language skills.And in English writing,the students mostly recite the model and apply the template,and teacher's correction is aimed at language and grammar mistakes,thus students' writing is concerned with the correctness of language and grammar mistakes,and the content and logic of the article are seldom concerned.Because of this situation,continuation task writing came into being,which focuses on the content and logic of the writing,especially emphasizes the ability of reasoning and evaluation in critical thinking.Since few empirical researches have been done on relationship between critical thinking and continuation task currently,thus 50 senior high school students were taken as the object to analyze the correlation relationship between continuation task and critical thinking ability by using both quantitative and qualitative devices,namely,tests of the critical thinking disposition,critical thinking skills and writing tests.Quantitative data was analyzed by using Excel and SPSS18.0 to check whether critical thinking ability and continuation task writing were correlated with each other.According to the result,critical thinking ability of senior high school students are generally in the medium level,but far away from high level,and only a few students perform well.The result of critical thinking disposition test shows that senior high school students have a better performance in terms of openness,but they need to be improved in terms of systematicity and analysis.While the result of critical thinking skills show that students perform well in analysis and reasoning,but they need to be enhanced in evaluation.And continuation task writing is found to be correlated with both critical thinking disposition and critical thinking skills by using SPSS18.0.However,there are still some exceptions,in which some students perform well in critical thinking tests,but get a low score in continuation task.According to an interview to students,personal life experience,emotion,attitude and familiarity with the material also affect the results of continuation task.Teacher can be inspired to improve critical thinking ability through emphasizing relevance,explicitness,coherence and sufficiency in continuation task and enhance students' ability of analysis,reasoning,inference,and evaluation to improve their continuation task.