A Study On The Correlation Between Senior High School Students’ Critical Thinking Disposition And Strategies Of Knowledge Representation In English Writing

Writing has been considered an important factor to measure learners’ language proficiency.Many researchers have devoted themselves to studying critical thinking disposition and strategies of knowledge representation to improve writing performance,but few have combined the two aspects together.This study is therefore undertaken to investigate the current situation of critical thinking disposition and strategies,as well as the relationship between them,seeking to find out the correlation between senior high school students’ critical thinking disposition and strategies of knowledge representation.Based on constructivism,output hypothesis and metacognitive strategies,this thesis seeks to address the following three questions:1)What is the general situation of senior high school students’critical thinking disposition and the overall use of strategies of knowledge representation?2)What is the correlation between critical thinking disposition and strategies of knowledge representation?3)Are there any differences in the correlation between critical thinking disposition and strategies of knowledge representation between high achievers and low achievers?If yes,what are differences?Questionnaire survey and interview are adopted in this study.Two questionnaires employed in this study were Critical Thinking Disposition Inventory adapted by Peng Meici et al.(2004)with the internal reliability of.798,and the questionnaire on strategies of knowledge representation designed by Qin Xiaoqing and Bi Jin(2012)with the internal reliability of.814.The questionnaires were handed out to 160 Senior Three students from Xinghua Middle School on December 15th,2019 and finally 149 were found valid.Then,the data was processed by SPSS 24.0.The interview was a semi-structured interview with 10 students being chosen from those whose questionnaire were considered valid.Detailed analysis of both quantitative and qualitative research yields the following findings.Firstly,students show a relatively weak critical thinking disposition on the whole(M=269.69).The mean score of each scale ranks from the highest to lowest as follows:maturity,inquisitiveness,open-mindedness,truth-seeking,systematicity,critical thinking confidence and analyticity.Students have a positive tendency toward the use of these strategies to represent knowledge(M=3.37).In terms of six strategies,subjective perspective strategies rank the first,followed by objective statement strategies,paraphrasing strategies,contrastive evidence strategies,objective perspective strategies,comprehensive processing strategies.Secondly,critical thinking disposition and strategies of knowledge representation are positively correlated.Contrastive evidence strategies,obj ective statement strategies,comprehensive processing strategies are positively correlated with students’ critical thinking disposition at the.01 level.Thirdly,high achievers’ contrastive evidence strategies and paraphrasing strategies are positively related to critical thinking disposition.Low achievers’subjective perspective strategies are positively related to critical thinking disposition.In light of the findings,this thesis proposes some pedagogical implications:1)Teachers should design teaching activities that help activate students’ critical thinking.2)Teachers should give students more chances to express their opinions.3)Teachers should guide students to think critically by questioning,debate,brainstorming and so on.