An Empirical Study On The Application Of Journalistic English To English Courses To Develop College Students’ Critical Thinking Skills

According to American educator Dewey, the principal purpose of education is to learn to think. Fostering of critical thinking skills has become the goal of higher education. Therefore, the training of critical thinking is of great value. Western countries,with the United States as the representative,attach great importance to the cultivation of critical thinking of citizens in this area.Now our China has come to pay much attention to it and make various research work after the proposal of “Quality Education”. “National Medium and Long-term Education Reform and Development plan” emphasizes that the core of education reform and development is to train the student to be innovative and better at solving problems. China’s Ministry of Education also put forward critical thinking to be the aims of education for college English students and made specific requirements for the training of critical thinking among college English students. Although for college students, the fostering of critical thinking skills may have close relationship with each of the courses. College English course, being a required subject in most universities, should take the responsibility to integrate into the cultivation of critical thinking skills.According to the research in China, Many previous domestic studies are mainly for English majors. There are very few studies concerning cultivation of critical thinking skills through College English courses for non- English major college students. Aiming at the actual state of the deficiency of critical thinking skills among college students, this essay has been written to make this research and explore the culturing method on critical thinking skills. Introduction of the journalistic English into college English classes has been widely studied at home, but mostly for improving listening, speaking, reading and writing. The teaching of English news has never been connected with the training of critical thinking skills. Therefore,the present study is to explore critical thinking skills among non-English major students and mainly focus on whether application of English news in the College English Course can enhance students’ critical thinking skills by proposing addenda of English news to teaching of College English. The empirical study for a term has followed up the application of measuring testing and interviews.About one hundred and six students from non--English majors from the university took part in this study. The empirical research on college students’ critical thinking with the application of English news teaching made by tests and interviews studies.Tests were made between the two classes of our University for four months.Using “California Critical Thinking Disposition Inventory(CCTDI) and “California Critical Thinking Skills Test(CCTST)” to measure the students’ critical thinking spirit and critical thinking skills respectively before and after the tests. The data was analyzed by SPSS 19.0 software(IBM SPSS Statistics).The following research questions are explored in the study:1.Are there any remarkable differences in critical thinking skills for them as freshmen?2.Does application of English news to the College English Course enhance the critical thinking ability of College English Students to a larger degree than regular English Course instruction alone?3.Is there a discrepancy in the training of critical thinking ability between these two groups after the adding of English news?This study comes to conclusion as follows:As the data analyzed revealed that, after a semester of critical thinking cultivation,the experimental group was significantly increased in critical thinking spirit but not in critical thinking skills. The results showed that the cultivation of critical thinking by English news has a certain effect on college students’ critical thinking spirit.