An Experimental Study On Cultivating Non-English Majors’ Critical Writing Ability

English writing is an important component of students’ comprehensive English ability which requires excellence both in language and content.However,as is found in previous research,students usually place much emphasis on language use,accuracy of grammar,and writing skills rather than writing content.This has resulted in many“empty writings” in standardized formula.Therefore,it is necessary to cultivate students’ writing ability,especially their critical writing ability.Critical thinking as a high level thinking process which includes reasoning,analyzing,interpreting,evaluating and summarizing can be used as an effective tool to foster and facilitate students’ writing contents.Critical writing ability is the combination of critical thinking skills and written language competence,which is presented by relevance,explicitness,sufficiency and coherence in writing content(Wen,2006).Therefore,this study tries to explore the practical application and effect of cultivating students’ critical writing ability.It mainly focuses on answering the following research questions:(1)What’s the effect of the teaching experiment on students’ writing achievements in proficiency tests?(2)How does the teaching experiment influence the contents of the students’ writings?(3)To what extent does the teaching experiment help promote the students’ critical thinking skills?This teaching experiment is conducted on 72 non-English majors who are selected randomly at a Chinese university within a period of 18 weeks.They are divided into experimental and control groups.Traditional teaching method of writing is adopted in the control group while a series of critical writing training based on Facione’s(1990)model of critical thinking skills,process approach in teaching writing and constructivism is conducted on the experimental group.This teaching experiment can be divided into 3 stages.The first stage is pre-writing training,among which getting-to-know activity,after-reading response,brainstorming,drawing outlines and refining,and group discussions are included.The second stage is writing and rewriting practice.Writing the first draft,peer review,self revision and writing the second draft are included.The third stage is revising and reflecting which includes the online assessment through TRP,teacher feedback,students’ final writing and self reflection.California Critical Thinking Skills Test(CCTST),writing tests of DET and a Teaching Resource Platform(TRP)are used before and after the experiment to measure the changes of students’ critical thinking skills and writing test achievements.An integrated evaluative standard of Wen’s(2006)grading criteria of writing content and critical writing indicators of Newman(1995)is used to assess students’ change of writing content.All the collected data are analyzed by SPSS18.0 to process the Descriptive Statistics analysis,Paired Samples Test and Frequency Statistics analysis.The results show that:(1)The designed teaching experiment has a positive effect on improving students’ writing,which is demonstrated by the writing scores and gains in different writing levels in the English proficiency test.Before the experiment,the mean scores of the two groups are close(13.94、14.06)and most students’ writings are in the 4th level(12-14).After the experiment,the mean score of the experimental group(15.64)is0.95 higher than the control group(14.69)and 83.33% students reach the 5th level(15-17).There is a significant difference in the Paired Samples Test(sig.=0.000).(2)After the experiment,4 significant changes are found in the writing content of the experimental group.In terms of relevance,all the arguments are closely related to the topic;descriptions of phenomena are more objective;the whole organization are more complete and all-rounded.In terms of explicitness,there are important and significant points and issues in the whole composition;all the arguments are explicit and unambiguous;students pay more attention to clear up ambiguities.In terms of sufficiency,the core argument is more focused and the supporting arguments are more logical;the reasoning is objective and from different perspectives;there are more proofs,judgments and solutions to the arguments;suggestions or solutions are of practical utility.In terms of coherence,all the statements are more relevant;there are some new problem-related information and outside knowledge added to arguments;the summarization of each supporting arguments has improved and their connections are more smooth.(3)Cultivating students’ critical writing ability has a positive effect on their critical thinking skills.Before the experiment,both the experimental and control group are in the backward of medium level of CTS.They perform best in analysis,moderate in inference and worst in evaluation.After the experiment,the experimental group’s overall CTS score(22.06)increases nearly 2 points higher than the control group(20.17).Their evaluating and inference skills have improved prominently,but their awareness of reflection has little change.This study implies that cultivating students’ critical writing ability should be process-oriented and student-centered,emphasizing the writing content and meaning.An appropriate teaching design can improve students’ writing content and facilitatingtheir comprehensive writing ability and critical thinking skills.In spite of the findings,this study is limited in the number of subjects and the instruments used,which are to be overcome in future research.