Senior High Students' Critical Thinking Disposition And Their English Writing Proficiency: A Correlation Study

In the National English Curriculum Standards for Senior High School(2017),thinking quality is listed as the core competence of English.Critical thinking ability,a key element of thinking quality,is composed of critical thinking skills and critical thinking disposition,with the latter as the driving force of critical thinking skills and the psychological basis for the effective development of critical thinking ability.Compared with listening,speaking,reading and other language abilities,English writing is a comprehensive process of information production,which is the better reflection of students' critical thinking disposition.Therefore the paper is dedicated to explore the correlation of the students' critical thinking disposition and English writing proficiency in senior high school,aiming to arouse teachers to think about the correlation between the two,so as to integrate the cultivation of critical thinking disposition into English writing teaching.The study focuses on 197 students in Grade Three from a key senior high school.Critical thinking disposition inventory by Wen Qiufang and English writing test are adopted to collect data.By means of SPSS,these data are analyzed from the descriptive analysis,paired sample T test,Pearson correlation analysis and regression analysis.Basing on the data collection and analysis,the study explores the current situation of senior high school students' critical thinking disposition,English writing proficiency and the correlation between them.Besides,eight students are also interviewed to support the quantity study.The result of study reveals that:(1)The overall critical thinking disposition of senior high school students is positive.Among the dimensions of critical thinking disposition,open-mindedness,inquisitiveness,cognitive maturity,justice-orientedness,analyticity and truth-seeking are positive disposition,while self-confidence and systematicity are pendulous disposition.(2)The English writing proficiency of senior high school students have reached the “good ”level on the English composition scoring standard of the college entrance examination.(3)There is a moderate positive correlation between senior high school students' overall critical thinking disposition and English writing proficiency.That is,the more positive their critical thinking disposition,the higher their English writing proficiency.In the dimensions of criticalthinking disposition,there is a moderate positive correlation among open-mindedness,truth-seeking,cognitive maturity and English writing proficiency,while there is a low positive correlation among the correlation between analyticity,justice-orientedness,self-confidence,inquisitiveness and English writing proficiency.Besides,it's worth noting that there is no statistically significant correlation between systematicity and writing proficiency.In addition,open-mindedness,analyticity and truth-seeking have a significant predictive effect on English writing proficiency,among which open-mindedness is relatively strong.According to the data analysis and interview,the study provides suggestions on the English writing teaching from the perspective of critical thinking disposition,including updating teachers' educational concepts,optimizing teaching contents,innovating teaching methods,and improving teaching evaluation,in order to achieve the senior high school students' critical thinking disposition more positive and further improve their critical thinking in English writing.