An Empirical Study Of English Major Undergraduates' Critical Thinking Skills

As the basis of innovation,critical thinking which includes critical thinking skills and critical thinking disposition,is of great importance in people' life and it has become the cultivation goals of many universities and colleges.Research on critical thinking has been focused on for many years and a lot of experience and achievements have been achieved.The western research on critical thinking includes theoretical designing,the development and revision of testing instruments,the ways and methods to develop critical thinking and so on.While the domestic research is mainly about the introduction of critical thinking,theoretical reviews of critical thinking,the translation and revision of critical thinking assessment tools,and the ways and methods to cultivate critical thinking.Although some experts(Wen,2012;Luo,2001;Peng,2004)have done research to measure the undergraduates' critical thinking development,however,there is still no clear evaluation or claim on the development level of students' critical thinking in detail,such as the current development level of students' critical thinking skills and the sub skills.Thus the thesis does the practical research to have a deep understanding on the status quo of English majored undergraduates' whole critical thinking skills and analyze the skills of analysis,evaluation and inference.In the thesis,through the analysis of the English argumentative essays,the research wants to have a comprehensible understanding of status quo of English majored undergraduates' critical thinking skills and three important sub skills,and the data are assisted by the information collected through interviews for both teachers and students.According to the final research results,the research finds that the level of the undergraduates' critical thinking skill is not very high,and it is between the medium and the low levels.As to the three sub skills,the scores of analysis and evaluation are higher,which are much higher than that of inference.Especially the skill of analysis gets the highest score.Then it comes to the evaluation skill,which is at the medium level,since most of evidence the writers used to support the claims is lack of credibility and few writers could offer supplementary information to strengthen their own views or weaken the opposite ones.Finally,the undergraduates have a low-level inference,since only some of them could provide logical recommendations for action or further study,and they just summarize the conclusion in one sentence to cooperate with their points of view proposed in the first paragraph.