Research On Cultivation Of Critical Thinking Ability In English Teaching

This research is conducted in an American college in a 7-week long preparatory intensive English learning course for college academic study.Ten participants are involved in this research: A professor as a native English speaker;Nine students of different countries,such as China,Japan,Vietnam,and Venezuela.The present research intends to explore the following two questions:(1)What are the main activities or strategies used by the teacher in classroom to cultivate students' critical thinking?(2)What effects do they have on students' critical thinking development?By The researcher taking notes in class and conducting interview with the professor,the data for answering the first research question will be collected and analyzed to descriptively generalize the activities and strategies used.In addition,students' written work to will be collected and analyzed at the beginning and end of the course as pretest and post-test of students critical thinking ability respectively to examine students' progress on each of these critical thinking criteria proposed by Wen Qiufang(2009): Clarity,relevancy,logicality profundity,flexibility.The researcher has found that Socratic questions,problem solving strategy,self-evaluation and peer-evaluation,individual conference,and teaching students learning strategies are mainly used activities and strategies by the professor.And great progress has been made by students through the comparison between pretest and post-test results.Their progress is mainly reflected in the following aspects: How clear are thesis;How relevant are the supporting ideas of the essay to the thesis;How coherent is the writing;How profound and broad are students' arguments or ideas;How flexible students can be to when it comes to mention different viewpoints from their owns.Through this research,the author hopes it can give some implications to how to cultivate critical thinking in English classroom in China.