A Study On Critical Thinking Dispositions And Skills In English Writing Of English Majors

In recent years, critical thinking has always been emphasized as an important educational goal for cultivating individuals both in Western countries and in China. Critical thinking refers to an ability to make a purposeful and rational judgment to something based on the specific standards. It is composed of critical thinking skills and critical thinking dispositions. Critical thinking skills can be directly involved in critical thinking activities, and critical thinking dispositions represent the beliefs, attitudes and willingness towards critical thinking activities. Western scholars have been devoted to the research of college students’ critical thinking since the 1980 s. And the studies in Western countries can mainly be classified into three groups: defining critical thinking, constructing assessing instruments of critical thinking and exploring the effective ways to cultivate students’ critical thinking. In China, the cultivation of English majors’ critical thinking has been also paid attention to since the late 1990 s. Some empirical studies have been conducted to explore whether English majors are deficient in critical thinking.At present, domestic studies are mainly concerned about studying critical thinking in general or one dimension of it —— the critical thinking skills or critical thinking dispositions. But how critical thinking skills and critical thinking dispositions are related has seldom been examined in the previous studies. In addition, the present empirical studies do not study the relationship between students’ critical thinking skills and their writing performance, although there are studies to assess English majors’ critical thinking skills based on their writing performance. What’s worse, in the studies on English majors’ critical thinking dispositions, the instruments used are developed by Western scholars, and some items are undoubtedly not applicable to Chinese learners, so the validity of the results needs to be further examined. Furthermore, the English majors’ current states of critical thinking skills and dispositions at different stages are seldom researched.Taking all those into account, the present study aims to investigate the current situations of English majors’ critical thinking skills and dispositions and to examine the relationship between critical thinking skills and dispositions and the relationship between students’ critical thinking skills and writing performance. Therefore, the following research questions are raised to address the issues:(1) What are the current situations of English majors’ critical thinking skills?(2) What are the current situations of English majors’ critical thinking dispositions?(3) Are English majors’ critical thinking skills positively correlated with their critical thinking dispositions?(4) Are English majors’ critical thinking skills positively correlated with their writing performance?The present study selected 120 English majors from four grades in Lanzhou Jiaotong University as the subjects. And 30 students were extracted from each grade by using stratified-random sampling. The current study employed Qualitative Florida Scale for Critical Thinking Skills developed by the researchers from University of Florida and the questionnaire of critical thinking dispositions designed by Wen Qiufang et al. as the instruments. The 120 subjects were required first to finish the independent writing test of TOEFL within 30 minutes. After the completion of the writing test, subjects were demanded to finish the questionnaire of critical thinking dispositions. The raters then independently assessed the 120 compositions according to the independent writing rubrics and Qualitative Florida Scale for Critical Thinking Skills. And the scores of questionnaire on critical thinking dispositions were calculated according to scoring guidelines provided by Scholar Wen et al..Four major findings are made based on the data analyses by using SPSS 16.0 software:(1) English majors’ critical thinking skills are at a low level, though there is a significant difference in overall critical thinking skills between freshmen and seniors. When it comes to the specific critical thinking skills, each grade’s means for the specific critical thinking skills can be ranked from high to low in the same way. All the subjects have relatively good performance in interpretation, while they are found to be weak in all critical thinking skills except interpretation, especially in explanation and self-regulation. Besides, no significant differences in the specific critical thinking skills have been found from Grade One to Grade Four.(2) Overall English majors hold positive dispositions toward critical thinking. The students from four grades are all strongly positive towards inquisitiveness but negative towards systematicity and self-confidence. Besides, there is a decrease on students’ mean scores of critical thinking dispositions and overall critical thinking dispositions from Grade Four to Grade One except truth-seeking and cognitive maturity. There exists significant difference between freshmen and juniors in systematicity, and freshmen are significantly different from seniors in systematicity and truth-seeking.(3) There are slightly positive correlations between English majors’ critical thinking skills and critical thinking dispositions.(4) There are strongly positive correlations between English majors’ critical thinking skills and their writing performance.The research results provide some implications for the English language teaching and learning. In classroom instruction, teachers should attach emphasis to critical thinking skills and attempt to instill knowledge of them to students. Teachers ought to employ methods appropriate to gradually strengthen students’ cultivation of relatively weak respects of critical thinking skills as explanation, self-regulation and etc. and improve their performance. Moreover, facing with the problem that English majors are weak in self-confidence and systematicity, teachers should develop various learning tasks to make students realize their progress so that their self-confidence can be strengthened. And students should be encouraged to exercise themselves in frustration and difficulties so that their willpower will be stronger and their systematicity will be strengthened. Furthermore, teachers are also expected to maintain the good in critical thinking dispositions by creating a favorable teaching atmosphere and to promote sustainable development of critical thinking skills by taking into account the pertinence and adaptability of teaching materials.