A Study On The Correlation Between English Majors Critical Thinking Disposition And Listening Comprehension Performance

Since the 1930 s, critical thinking has gradually drawn the attention of western researchers, while domestic relative researches on critical thinking has only experienced over ten years, and most of them mainly concentrate in the area of medical, nursing, logic and psychology, etc. In the field of English teaching, although some scholars have put forward the current situation of English majors weak critical thinking ability, but most researches are on the correlation between critical thinking and speaking as well as writing,etc. Researches on the correlation between the critical thinking and English majors' listening skills are not abundant enough.Based on this situation, this study, based on the theoretical framework of Facione on critical thinking disposition, aims to explore these questions:1) What are the basic characteristics of English majors' critical thinking on the dispositional dimension and those of English majors' listening comprehension performance?2) Is there any correlation between English majors' critical thinking disposition and listening comprehension performance? To what extent do the subscales of English majors' critical thinking disposition correlate with their performance in each listening comprehension category?3) Is there any difference in the correlations between English majors' critical thinking disposition and different listening comprehension performance groups?This study is a correlation research, and all the participants are 78 sophomores majoring in English selected from the school of foreign language, Hunan University.The Chinese version of California Critical Thinking Disposition Inventory(CTDI-CV)and two English listening comprehension tests selected from TEM-4 tests in 2013and2014 are applied to test participants' critical thinking disposition and the level of their listening comprehension performance respectively and then analyze the data collected from the test with Statistical Package for the Social Sciences(SPSS) to do the descriptive and correlation analyses.Findings in this study show that:(1) The overall English majors' critical thinking is in a rather weak disposition. Specifically, English majors tend to be best in the maturity subscale while they are rather weak in self-confidence. The overall characteristics of English majors' listening comprehension performance is in theintermediate level. Students score highest in conversations while lowest in news broadcasts.(2) Generally speaking, English majors' critical thinking disposition tends to be strongly and positively related with their listening comprehension performance.Truth-seeking, analyticity and systematicity have positive and strong correlation with listening comprehension performance. The correlation between open-mindedness and listening comprehension performance is rather weak. The correlations between analyticity, systematicity and conversations as well as the correlation between systematicity, truth-seeking subscales and passages are significant and positive. The correlation between news broadcasts and truth-seeking is also strongly positive.(3)Generally speaking, there exists a difference between critical thinking disposition and listening comprehension performance in different levels. The correlations between critical thinking disposition and listening comprehension performance in higher group are stronger than those of lower group.This study indicates that English majors' critical thinking needs to be further cultivated and trained, and there is a necessity to utilize the correlation between critical thinking disposition and listening comprehension performance in English listening teaching.