A Study On Junior Middle School Students' Critical Thinking Ability In Second Language Writing

Critical thinking ability is about self-regulation and self-judgement,which is a combination of personal cognition and emotion.For the cognitive part,it is made up of analysis,inference and evaluation;as for the emotional part,which includes curiosity,openness,confidence,integrity,justice and so on.The study on critical thinking ability abroad started earlier than domestic,and lots of researches could be taken into consideration.Hence a completed course on drilling critical thinking ability has formed abroad.However,less studies at home have been found,teachers in China tended to focus on grammar teaching and example modeling,it was such a single channel teaching model that students had less time to think independently.Most English learners were pressed for critical thinking ability based on "Force-feeding"model.What's more,little attention has been paid.by teachers to cultivating English learners' critical thinking ability.Therefore,this study aims to investigate junior middle school English learners' level of critical thinking ability in second language writing,so as to provide sheds for further English teaching as well as research.This study applied the theory about the investigation of junior middle school English learners' critical thinking ability into second language writing and studied on the following research questions:(1)What is the degree of middle school English learners' critical thinking ability?(2)What is the relationship between critical thinking ability and English writing?(3)What are the factors that influence English learners' critical thinking ability in English writing?180 subjects were chosen in this study and three stages were involved-To the beginning,180 students participated in the test of investigating what level of critical thinking ability that they were in.The test was adapted from Stapleton(2002)to explore the consequence.Then,partial subjects' writing samples were collected and corrected by three experienced teachers according to the judging standard.Next,a personal interview was performed in partial students to examine their understanding in critical thinking ability and their attitude while writing as well as gains during this experiment.This study reveals the results like followings:(1)The level of Junior middle school students' critical thinking ability are at moderate.(2)Critical thinking ability and English writing are positively correlated.(3)The familiarity in topic,language acquisition as well as teachers' teaching model are the factors that affect middle school English learners' critical thinking ability in English writing.