A Study Of The Correlation Between Pre-service English Teachers' Peer-feedback Activities And Critical Thinking Disposition

As a significant thinking model,Critical thinking has been widely recognized and developed in the education circle.High-level critical thinking is not only beneficial for teachers' professional development,but also helps to cultivate students' critical thinking so as to promote students' learning.Therefore,pre-service teachers are expected to improve their critical thinking ability.Recently,numerous studies have been conducted on critical thinking of in-service teachers.Nevertheless,studies on that of pre-service teachers are relatively rare,especially for pre-service English teachers.Meanwhile,for pre-service teacher,there are various courses in their postgraduate curriculum,ranging from case study,thesis writing?workshop?seminar?mini-lesson?English classroom observation to teaching internship,in which peer-feedback activities are widely occupied.Are peer-feedback activities helpful for pre-service English teachers' critical thinking disposition?Is there any correlation between them?By means of questionnaires and interview,this research takes 55 pre-service English teachers as research subjects to explore the status quo of their peer-feedback activities and critical thinking disposition.On this base,the correlations between these two are examined and analyzed hopefully to provide certain contributive suggestions about peer-feedback activities for promoting pre-service English teachers' critical thinking disposition.Three questions are put forward in this research:1.What is status quo of pre-service English teachers' peer feedback activities?2.What is status quo of pre-service English teachers' critical thinking disposition?3.What,if any,is the correlation between pre-service English teachers' peer feedback activities and their critical thinking disposition?The major findings are concluded as follows:1.Firstly,pre-service English teachers' participation in peer feedback activities is at upper middle level.In terms of frequency,they often participate in peer-feedback activities;as for the attitude,most of them are positive and supportive to peer-feedback activities.However,when it comes to performance,they are not well-prepared before activities.Besides,there is a lack of certain professional guidance from teachers and summary as well as reflection by themselves after feedback,which needs to be improved further.2.Secondly,the level of pre-service English teachers' critical thinking disposition has reached a medium level.Within seven dimensions,the ranking order is:curiosity>self-confidence> analyticity> systematization> truth-seeking> open-mindedness>maturity.3.Last but not least,there is a positive and weak correlation between pre-service English teachers' peer-feedback activities and critical thinking disposition.The positive correlations among pre-service English teachers' peer-feedback activities and these sub-dimensions of critical thinking disposition,including "Analyticity","Truth-seeking"and "Self-confidence" do exist,but the correlations are not in high level.Besides,pre-service English teachers' critical thinking disposition and their performance in peer-feedback activities is correlated with each other in general.Based on the research findings,some suggestions were put forward including the arrangement of peer-feedback activities,the strategies of peer-feedback activities and the stimulation of critical thinking for pre-service English teachers and teachers' education projects,so as to promote the development of pre-service English teachers' critical thinking.