An Empirical Study Of The Effects Of English-major Students’ Critical Thinking Ability On Their English Writing Proficiency

In China,English teaching has been emphasizing the cultivation of the basic language skills(Wen & Zhou,2006),which causes the ignorance of the development of critical thinking and even leads to the absence of it for the English majors(Huang,2010;Zhong,2018).The focus of the present study is to evaluate how English-major students’ critical thinking ability will affect their English writing proficiency through the approaches of textual analysis and scale assessment.Chosen from an English-major class in a language university,the subjects were first evaluated by the scale assessment designed by Ye(2003)to find out the details of their critical thinking.They then wrote a TEM-8 argumentative essay in class to demonstrate their English writing proficiency.Textual analysis is used to explore the concrete elements that influence English writing proficiency,and SPSS 17.0 is used to analyze the data.The findings are as follows: 1.The English-major students’ overall critical thinking ability is in the middle level;2.There is a significant positive correlation between students’ critical thinking and their writing proficiency;3.The students’ critical thinking ability and its sub-skills have a significant effect on their English writing;4.Students who have strong critical thinking ability outperform the weak ones in relevance,clarity,logicality,profundity and flexibility.In the end,the author gives some pedagogical suggestions and recommendations for future research.