A Study Of English Majors’ Critical Thinking Ability In Argumentative Writing

In the1980s, critical thinking became the target of higher education programs in such foreign countries as the US and Canada. It gained its attention in China only in recent years. In order to foster English majors’critical thinking ability, National English Language Curriculum for English Majors (2000) put the training of independent and creative thinking into one of its priorities. Although there has been a steady increase in the study of the general ability, it fails to point out what English majors are really short of or good at, which is beneficial not only to having a clear picture of specific critical skills but to giving a proper instruction to it as well.In order to explore what specific critical thinking skills that English majors are really short of or good at, this thesis focuses on the analysis of six skills from the two writings. The argumentation is chosen owing to its coverage of critical thinking. Those412participants are English majors from grade one to grade four in a211key university. The purpose of the study is to find out their general trends and characteristics in critical thinking so that they know their own advantages and disadvantages to the full. It tends to answer the following questions:1) What are the characteristics in the four grades students? What kind of skills have they been short of and have they possessed?2) What is the trend of critical thinking ability among those four grades students? Have they really improved their critical thinking skills after four-year study?Three experienced teachers took part in the scoring of the total compositions. By using Qualitative Skills Instrument and SPSS, the research has found that the first year students possesses the skills of interpretation and explanation, but are short of the rest. Sophomores did better than freshmen in almost all skills except explanation. Most of juniors have possessed all skills except evaluation. Some critical thinking skills of seniors dropped, or even did worse than freshmen. According to the statistics, it could be concluded that after having writing classes, all the skills increase, but the skill of explanation dropped. As students repeated plenty of model articles during writing exercises, they are confined to those given examples. They could not open their mind to give creative ideas. Juniors did the best among all the other grades. However, the performance of seniors is a little disappointing. All the results show that the current teaching of writing has some problems.At the end of this research, the author would like to illustrate the existing problems in teaching of writing to provide feasible suggestions to teaching in the future and hopes that this essay would give some suggestions for further studies.