Effects Of English Writing-continuation Task On High School Students' Critical Thinking Development—a Perspective Of Alignment

Critical thinking, as an elemental part of modern education, has been recognized as one of the core skills for high school students by the National English Curriculum Standards. Yet in real language classrooms, critical thinking-although studies around it in the field of second language acquisition have been springing up over the decades-is often underestimated or even neglected due to the traditional curriculum design, where the overall English language skills remain a major principle for teaching aims and evaluation. Therefore,the interactional function of English language is overstated in classroom instruction while its informative and cognitive functions are often overlooked.Under such circumstances,this research endeavors to develop an English language task that can efficiently attend to both the language skills and critical thinking skills of high school students who are in short of time and energy. The writing-continuation task,as a result,comes into the research focus, whose effectiveness in improving language skills is already verified. To explore its influence on critical thinking development, three issues are addressed in this paper: 1. The current status of high school students' critical thinking skills and their relations with English proficiency; 2. The effectiveness of writing-continuation task in promoting critical thinking skills; 3. The inner mechanism of writing-continuation task for critical thinking development. Two studies are conducted to answer the questions. Study 1 is a two-month quasi-experimental study intended to assess students' critical thinking levels and to examine the effect of continuation tasks on critical thinking development; and Study 2 is designed for the last research question, exploring students' thinking processes in completing a writing-continuation task via think-aloud protocols.There are three major findings: 1. The current level of high school students' critical thinking is relatively discouraging, the level of which is moderately correlated with their English proficiency; 2. The writing-continuation task does contribute to their critical thinking development, benefiting lower-level students more; 3. The inner mechanism lies in the sociocognitive alignment processes embedded in the continuation task completion,which greatly exercise and enhance students critical thinking skills.