On The Relationship Between Non-English Major’s Critical Thinking Disposition And Their English Writing Achievements

Critical Thinking Ability includes both Critical Thinking Skills(CTS)and Critical Thinking Disposition(CTD).CTD is the habitual intrinsic motivation of people and the drive for learning critical thinking knowledge and skills.Also it is the psychological foundation of the critical thinking ability.Ever since 1980 s,many countries have made it a goal for universities education.The attention of foreign language circles in China paid to critical thinking from 1998,and since then,many scholars have participated in this field.However,most domestic research focus on English majors,and there are also more theoretical studies and less empirical studies.Much less the relationship between CTS and English writing.Therefore,this study aims to investigate the relationship between non-English majors’ critical thinking ability and their English writing.Based on the questionnaire of critical thinking disposition revised by Wen’s group and Juku--one of the automatic feedback system,this study conducted a correlation analysis of eight English writing achievements and critical thinking disposition questionnaires within one semester of 124 non-English major students from a local provincial university.The result was analyzed through SPSS19.0.The research showed that:1.The overall situation of non-English major students’ critical thinking disposition was a positive disposition,but it was in a weak level.2.According to students’ English writing scores,they were divided into high score group and low score group.It is found that their CTD were both reluctantly supportive.However,there was no significant difference between the two groups.For each dimension,the biggest differences between the two were open-mindedness and justice-orientednss,and the least difference was systematicity.3.In the eight dimensions of CTD,both liberal arts and science students got the highest scores in justice-orientednss and the lowest scores in systematicity.However,the scores of liberal arts students were generally slightly higher than that of science students.4.Overall,the non-English major students’ critical thinking disposition was slightly positively related to English writing.In terms of dimensions,truth-seeking was the closest to English writing,and systematicity was the most alienated.It’s worth noting that the truth-seeking of science students had a low correlation with English writing.Besides this,the other dimensions was just a extremely weak correlation.The critical thinking disposition influences English writing achievement to a certain extent,and writing course is one of the most effective courses to cultivate students’ critical thinking ability.Therefore,this study suggested that students should improve their thinking ability in English writing,and teachers should update their teaching concept,guide students how to learn to explore knowledge.Teachers should help students improve their CTD,especially the truth-seeking and open-mindedness.At the same time,teachers should assist writing teaching with automatic feedback system,and provide students with more opportunities to write to improve their English writing achievements in the process of continuous practice and revision.