An Investigation Of Senior High School Students' Critical Thinking Ability In English Writings

Critical thinking is purposeful self-regulation and self-judgement,including reflection,generalization,assumption,reasoning and evaluation.Little attention has been paid to cultivate senior high school English learners' critical thinking in traditional English education.Many teachers focus more on indoctrination of grammar and writing skills while they neglect the cultivation of English learners' critical thinking ability.Lots of domestic scholars carry out theoretical discussions about English learners' critical thinking.The empirical research remains some limitations in the studies about critical thinking ability.Therefore,this study is intended to investigate the current situations of critical thinking and explores the degree of senior high school English learners' critical thinking ability in order to put forward some useful suggestions and improve their critical thinking abilityas well as English pedagogy.This study applies the theory about the investigation of senior high school English learners' critical thinking in English writing and studies in the following research questions:(1)Do senior high school English learners display elements of critical thinking in English writing?(2)To what degree they display critical thinking ability in their English writing?(3)What are the factors that influence their critical thinking ability in English writing?The present study investigates the critical thinking of 235 senior high school English learners through three stages.Firstly,designed by Stapleton(2001),the questionnaire is employed to explore senior high school English learners' critical thinking in writing.The results of questionnaire are input into SPSS 13.0 by descriptive statistics and have further analysis.Then writing samples are collected and evaluated from four elements of critical thinking by three teachers to obtain overall understanding about levels of senior high school English learners' critical thinking.Besides,the text is analyzed to look into factors that may influence critical thinking.Lastly,according to composition scores,subjects are divided into four groups which include “sufficient argument and deep abstraction”,“insufficient argument and shallow abstraction”,“insufficient argument and shallow abstraction” and “insufficient arguments and shallow abstraction”.Five subjects are selected randomly from each group in order to explore English learners' attitudes towards other viewpoints.The results reveal that(1)Senior high school English learners have critical thinking in English writing and they also have their own thoughts in process of writing.(2)Critical thinking of senior high school English learners is at the intermediate level.(3)Topic familiarity is a key factor to affect senior high school English learners' critical thinking.English learners can put forward more arguments in writing when they are familiar with the topic.Personal experience is an important source of argument in English writing.