A Study Of Strategies To Cultivate Senior Three Students' Critical Thinking In English Writing

The new Curriculum standard of Senior English for China students(2017)issued by Ministry of Education,aims to develop students' language competence,culture consciousness,thinking quality and learning competence which are students' core competences in English.Of the four,students' thinking quality is the ability which can be embodied logically,critically and creatively,and is also the mental characteristic.Therefore,the development of students' thinking quality not only promotes core competences in English,but also promotes students' abilities to analyze and solve problems.Critical thinking can promote students' thinking quality.“Writing” as a basic language competence,requires students to apply what they have learnt in an integrate way in a common and specific context,to understand the meaning that is expressed in a written discourse,to recognize the method that is adopted to express the meaning appropriately,and to express the meaning in written form effectively.The author confronts a new problem in senior three's English writing: the students cannot improve their writing competence through a great amount of memorizing phrases and samples.After interviewing and analyzing over and over again,the author figures out the problems that the students' thinking determines their writing.Hence,promoting senior students' critical thinking is practically significant.In order to focus on the objective of the research,the whole project is guided by the following two questions:1.What are the problems of the students' writing concerning critical thinking?2.Are the strategies of cultivating critical thinking the author adopts effective in influencing the students' English writing?During the cultivating,the author applies some strategies from Stella Cottrell's Critical Thinking Skills.In order to verify the effectiveness of the strategies,the author uses SPSS21.0 and Microsoft Office Excel to analyze the data from critical thinking tests and writing tests,which makes a conclusion as follows:1.According to critical thinking's cognitive skills,the author decides the problems of the students' writing concerning critical thinking.2.Based on the problems,according to Benjamin Bloom's Taxonomy,the authors decides the strategies and their sequence of cultivating critical thinking.3.In order to check the effectiveness of strategies,the author does a research on the correlation between the students' critical thinking ability and their English writing ability,which can give some clues to the following researchers.