The Correlation Between Senior High School Students' Critical Thinking Skills And English Writing

In English teaching,writing is important but difficult,among which English argumentation is the core of writing teaching in senior high school.As an integrated ability including analysis,synthesis,reasoning and judgment,critical thinking skills affect the level of students' English argumentation writing.If teachers know the situation of senior high school students' critical thinking skills and its relationship with English argumentation writing,they can be more targeted to improve students' English argumentation writing ability.This study chose 156 students in Grade Three from a senior high school in Zhangzhou as subjects,and employed questionnaire survey,text analysis and interviews as its research methods.Based on the existing theoretical and empirical studies on critical thinking skills and English writing,this paper explores the correlation between critical thinking skills of senior high school students and its English argumentation writing.Four results are shown as follows:(1)Senior high school students have the positive critical thinking disposition in the whole;(2)The students perform quite differently on 8dimensions of critical thinking skills,which rank,judged by the score,form inquisitiveness,justness,open-mindedness,truth-seeking,cognitive maturity,analyticity,to resilience and self-confidence;(3)The Pearson Correlation between critical thinking skills of senior high school students and its English argumentation writing is 0.482,which suggests that they have a positive correlation.What's more,three dimensions of critical thinking skills,the abilities of analyticity,truth-seeking and cognitive maturity,have the correlation with English argumentation writing as well,as their Pearson Correlations being respectively 0.348,0.416 and 0.477;(4)The critical thinking skills do affect senior high students' English argumentation writing in understanding the composition topic,developing a thesis statement and supporting arguments,organizing a coherent discourse and putting ideas into writing.In the end,from the perspectives of English teachers and schools,some practical suggestions on improving senior high school students' critical thinking skills and English argumentation writing ability from the classroom English teaching and course installation aregiven,hoping to provide certain reference value for further researches.