The Correlation Study Of Critical Thinking And Junior High School Students’ Writing

Language and thinking are closely intermingled. Writing is a high intensity of thinking activity, no matter what stage of the whole writing process the writer is in. Language is the media of thinking, and writing is the written expression of language, so writing can be a good indicator of human’s thinking ability. As one of the most significant thinking abilities, critical thinking (CT) undoubtedly correlates with writing. Only by disclosing the close correlation between CT and EFL writing can English teachers of junior high schools be fully aware of the significance of cultivating CT in English language education.Currently, EFL writing teaching hasn’t paid much attention to the cultivation of students’critical thinking, especially in China. With the traditional teaching pedagogy, most of the English teachers are too much focused on the teaching of language knowledge and language skills, which is also the case in English writing classes. Students always would like to recite model essays and apply template when writing. Most of the teachers only pay attention to language using and grammatical errors when assessing the compositions. It leads to many serious problems of students’ compositions particularly in argumentative writing such as the boring and hallow content, unclear demonstrations and chunks that is lack of logic.The hypothesis of this study is that writing is highly correlated with thinking. Since the domestic empirical researches on correlations between junior high school students’critical thinking and writing proficiency is not enough, this thesis is trying to make up for the void. The whole study takes 40 students of Grade 8 in a junior high school as the research subjects. Chinese Version of Critical Thinking Disposition Test and Critical Thinking Skills Tests are both used as the instruments to analyze the general level and characteristics of critical thinking. And an English writing test is also conducted to generally analyze the conditions of students’writing. The compositions are evaluated according to the rubric designed in the writing test for the entrance examination to senior middle schools so as to make correlation analysis between the result of writing and the result of their critical thinking. To figure out in what aspects of compositions do critical thinking mostly exert influence on, we also made another evaluation which is from the perspective of the critical thinking skills use in argumentative writing. Apart from the statistical evaluation, qualitative analysis of the compositions, majorly from relating the critical thinking with the four parameters of compositions, namely, relevance, explicitness, coherence and sufficiency is given. Most of the data collected is analyzed by Excel, while the correlation analysis would be done through SPSS 18.0.According to the research results, junior high school students do have certain CT abilities especially when it comes to the critical thinking dispositions. For example, junior high school students tend to be open-minded towards the unknown and tolerant towards different opinions and their own biases. Besides, they have confidence in their own judgments and decisions. But in the dispositions of analysis, systematicity and maturity they display obvious deficiency. And in CT skills test, they also display deficiency in analysis, inference and evaluation, which are all the core skills of critical thinking. With the result of CT tests as well as their average scores of the compositions scored twice by using two scoring rubrics, the correlation test confirms the hypothesis that critical thinking is significantly correlated with the writing proficiency either in CTS or CTD. But there are still some special cases that students who have high CT get low writing proficiency. And through analysis, writing can be affected both by critical thinking but also some other factors like the language knowledge, participant’s attitudes, interests, confidence and writing strategies. And lastly, through another qualitative evaluation of the compositions, we generally concluded that the influence of CT on junior high students’ English writing can be summarized into the following aspects:relevance, explicitness, coherence and sufficiency. And it is recognized through qualitative analysis that a certain aspect of composition is affected by maybe one or several critical thinking skills. By the end of the thesis, some pedagogical suggestions concerning the teaching methods, writing tasks and evaluation rubric were made to foster students’critical thinking when teaching writing. The precondition is that these teachers have already been fully aware of the significant role of critical thinking plays in writing, which the thesis is of great value.