The Correlation Between Rural Senior High Students' Critical Thinking Ability And Their English Writing Proficiency

English writing has been always considered as an important part in Chinese senior high school English teaching and learning.As one of the most important language outputs,English writing is often regarded as a hot potato by English learners considering that they often encounter some problems in the process of their daily English writing.Many scholars have attempted to connect thinking with writing in order to find solutions to these problems because it is known that there is a close relationship between thinking and writing.Because critical thinking is one important kind of thinking ability,it is necessary to do some research on the relationship between senior high students' critical thinking and their English writing.Based on related studies on critical thinking theories and on the relationship between critical thinking and writing both at home and abroad,120 senior three students from a rural high school in Chengdu are selected as research subjects in this present study.Meanwhile,WGCTA(Watson-Glaser Critical Thinking Appraisal)is adopted to test subjects' critical thinking ability and writing task entitled “My view on using cars” is used to test students' English writing proficiency.Hereafter,rating scale is adapted from argumentative thesis rating criteria made by Wen Qiufang and Liu Runqing.Then SPSS 20.0 is used to analyze quantitative data whereas the subjects' English writing text is utilized to get some qualitative data.It aims to explore the characteristics of rural senior high students' critical thinking ability and the correlation between rural senior high students' critical thinking and their English writing proficiency.The research results show that: first,rural senior high students' critical thinking abilities are not satisfactory.As for sub-skills of critical thinking ability,rural senior high students do best in assumptions recognizing whereas the weakest skill for them is inference.Second,the Quantitative result of Pearson correlation shows that both rural senior high students' overall critical thinking ability and critical thinking sub-skills have significant and positive correlations with their English writing proficiency.Third,the qualitative results show that rural senior high students do best in explicitness of English writing but do worse in reasoning.The qualitative results also reveal that students' overall critical thinking ability positively correlates with relevance,explicitness,coherence and reasoning.In the end,some constructive suggestions are put forward.At the same time,there are lots of limitations,which should be paid further exploration in the future.