The Cultivation Of Critical Thinking In University Second Language Writing Classes

The Chinese government has become to realize that the main objective of educationis to help the learners foster their critical thinking abilities. The dual dimensional framemodel proposed by Peter Facione and other experts in this field (APA,1990) provided usa clear view of the constitutions of critical thinking. What’s more, Janisek and Hitchhock(2005) put forth the pattern of critical thinking process. Flower and Hayes’ model (1981)which regards writing as a cognitive process perfectly matches with the critical thinkingprocess. Hereunto, the combination of the cultivation of critical thinking and theacademic teaching is feasible in theory. In this research, the author attempts to apply thecultivation of critical thinking ability in English writing classes at Chinese universities.The author conducted an empirical research in this article. By cultivating the studentswith the new teaching method of combining Critical Thinking instruction and CollegeEnglish teaching, the author aims to measure whether the Critical Thinking ability andthe writing ability of the students are improved or not.There are totally two assessing models in this paper. One is the Chinese revisedversion of CCTDI which is obtained after the examination of item analysis and reliabilitytest. This questionnaire is used to evaluate the development of critical thinkingdispositions of the students from both of the two groups by collecting data in thebeginning and the end of the experiment, the comparisons are made both between thetwo groups and in inner group. The other assessing model is the scale of evaluatingstudents’ writing abilities and critical thinking skills according to the writing of thestudents. This model is constructed based on the model constructing by Ennis and Frikenand the criteria adapted in IETLS writing examination. The assessing model is composedby three parts which respectively go through the textual level, linguistic level and overalllevel. The three parts contains ten standards of marking the writing of the students. The same as the way of measuring student’ critical thinking dispositions, the writing scoresand the scores obtained by the students in the three parts are compared between the twogroups and in inner group both at the beginning and in the end of the experiment.According to the results of data procession, the two research questions of this paper bothreceive affirmative answers. In other words, the integration of the critical thinkinginstruction with college second language teaching is beneficial for the improvements ofcritical thinking abilities and writing abilities of the students.