Research on Teaching Model of Integrating Critical Thinking Skills into College Public English Writing

Yu Yang

College of Foreign languages, Jilin Agricultural University, Changchun, China

Email: 284283440@qq.com

Yu Huai

College of Foreign languages, Jilin Agricultural University, Changchun, China

Email: bevanyu1980@163.com

[Abstract] Based on the“teaching principles of TERRIFIC”, a new approach to the integration of critical thinking skills and writing teaching is constructed. This new model covers four dimensions: integration of teaching objective, teaching content, teaching activities and teaching assessment. At the same time, some suggestions are proposed to assist the implementation of new model. By integrating critical thinking elements, the new teaching model provides new perspectives and ideas for the reform of public foreign language teaching in China’s colleges and universities.

[Keywords] Critical thinking skills; Writing; New teaching model; Public English.

Introduction

In the context of“New Liberal Arts and Significant Foreign Languages”, public foreign language education has undertaken dual missions of both instrumentality and humanism. Foreign language education should achieve the goal to stimulate students’humanistic empathy and innovative spirit. The fundamental basis of innovation spirit is critical thinking skills. The process of writing not only involves putting forward ideas, organizing evidence, carrying out demonstration and conducting reflection, but also combines the mental activities such as analyzing, reasoning, evaluating and self-regulating. Therefore, writing is one of the most effective courses to cultivate and test students’ critical thinking skills. The public foreign language writing education tends to focus on the explanation of language knowledge and the training of language skills. A large number of teaching activities in writing are carried out at the level of mechanical imitation and low-level critical thinking. This study attempts to explore a new approach to the teaching of public foreign language writing, integrating the development of critical thinking skills into the goal of English teaching in writing.

Literature Review

According to Cottrell (2005), critical thinking skill is a cognitive activity related to the use of the mind. Learning to think in a critical analysis and evaluation way means using cognitive processes, such as attention, classification, selection and judgment. The research on critical thinking skills abroad can be roughly divided into defining the subdivisional ability of critical thinking skills, constructing the measuring tool of critical thinking skills, and exploring the methods and effectiveness of the cultivation of critical thinking skills in higher education (Wen, 2009). Since the 1960s, critical thinking skill has been introduced to the teaching of writing, reading and other language teaching fields in western countries. Foreign research on the combination of writing teaching and critical thinking skills focuses on the cultivating and training of critical thinking skills, the design of teaching syllabus and other dimensions. The study on the integration of writing and critical thinking skills in China is mainly divided into three categories: on the relationship between writing and critical thinking skills (Li, 2017; Gao et al., 2017), on teaching mode construction and teaching strategies (Yu, 2014; Xiao et al. 2021); on teaching assessment (Li, 2011; Dong, 2017) .

The focus of previous research varies, but the research participants are all English majors. Scholars rarely delved into how to train non-English majors to improve their writing skills while cultivating their critical thinking skills. To a large extent, the reason is that domestic colleges and universities have not offered writing courses specifically for non-English majors. Based on the related research, this study explores the teaching path of infusing writing and critical thinking skills for non-English majors in colleges and universities.

Theoretical Basis

The theoretical basis of this study is the teaching principle proposed by Professor Sun Youzhong, which is called “TERRIFIC” for short. The eight principles include Targeting, Evaluating, Routinizing, Reflecting, Inquiring, Fulfilling, Integrating, and Content. (Sun, 2019) The teaching principles adhere to such a language learning concept: Language should be used as a means to develop high-level critical thinking skills. This means that students do not learn language for the sake of language, but aim to develop their critical thinking skills and apply it in situations beyond language classroom. (Richards et al., 2014) It advocates that critical thinking is a good habit of mental activity that needs to be cultivated through repeated training instead of being innate. The students should learn to evaluate the extent to which their thinking is affected by lack of knowledge or prejudice, emotion or any other factors, so as to limit their objectivity or rationality. The teaching principles also put forward the construction of inquiry classroom. Teaching process is problem-oriented and teachers inspire and guide students to think and explore actively, collect materials, and learn knowledge and solve problems independently. According to this theory, if the critical thinking skills are infused in the writing classroom, it will solve the problem of students’absence of critical thinking in writing to a certain extent.

Exploring Teaching Model of Integrating Critical Thinking Skills into Writing

The basic idea of the constructing the new teaching framework in the present study is to infuse the cultivation of critical thinking skills into the teaching of writing course. This means that the teachers should reconsider the teaching objective, contents, activities and assessing forms of the writing course. Therefore, the new teaching model needs to set teaching standards, provide teaching materials, design teaching activities and establish evaluation standards for critical thinking. Based on the above ideas and in combination with the author’s writing teaching practice, this study has constructed a new teaching model and conducted a preliminary teaching experiment in the author’s university. The new teaching model covers the following four aspects.

Infusion of teaching objective

The new writing syllabus should set a clear teaching goal to improve the students’critical thinking quality through the implementation of the writing process. On the contrary, the improvement of writing quality should be fed back by the critical thinking skills.

The overall goal of the new mode is to train students’critical thinking skills in three dimensions in the process of writing: clarity of language expression, depth and breadth of content and logic of structure. The specific objective is to train students to provide accurate and clear information in the process of writing, list reasonable examples and explanations, dig and explore the theme of composition, reflect multi angle and diversified thinking, connect the context of composition smoothly and conform to logical relations between sentences. Therefore, in the teaching of English writing, such a concept should be constantly implemented. Critical thinking skill is an effective tool for writing, while the writing process is also a constant exercise in the quality of critical thinking. To be specific, teachers should carry out the improvement of critical thinking skills in each specific unit and theme of the writing course, design and implement different teaching activities accordingly. As Sun Youzhong said, “In English teaching, the teachers should take a clear-cut stand to cultivate the critical thinking skills, learn the language through thinking, learn thinking through language, and simultaneously enhance the language ability and critical thinking skills” (Sun, 2019, p. 827).

Infusion of teaching content

The teaching content should be consistent with the teaching goal, which is the carrier to achieve the teaching goal. The teaching content must be able to guide students to improve their critical thinking skills in the process of acquiring language knowledge. In the new teaching mode, the teaching procedures of each unit are designed according to the process of “reading-discussing-writing”. In reading stage, teachers guide students to read and write articles related to the theme. Different topics are set for each class, covering various fields of culture and life, and corresponding critical thinking exercises are designed in both oral and written forms. Oral exercises are mainly discussion-based, and critical reading of the same material is conducted by mixing brainstorming and debate. Students are asked different questions in the reading process. In the writing stage, teachers provide a variety of writing tasks for the same topic, and teachers explain writing skills and critical thinking skills to fully stimulate students’critical thinking skills. After students finish writing, according to the evaluation criteria given by the teacher, through peer evaluation and self-evaluation, students are encouraged to read and revise the composition with a critical thinking method.

Infusion of teaching activities

Compared with the traditional teaching model, the new teaching model requires teachers to strive for the diversification and diversity of teaching models and teaching methods to stimulate the students’thinking initiative and better promote the development of students’critical thinking skills. Taking students as the center and taskorientation as the guidance, the teachers design activities that meet the students’ability and needs, and cultivate the students’ability to actively analyze problems. Such as designing activities of question and answer, quick answer, debate, discussion, brainstorming and presentation, and giving students as positive feedback as possible. In addition, the teachers can design more group cooperation activities to broaden students’perspective and enhance their listening ability in the process of communication with others.

Infusion of teaching assessment

An effective assessing mechanism should be constructed which combines formative assessment and summative assessment. Dong’s (2017) scoring scale is used in this study to grade the students’compositions and investigate their critical thinking skills in writing. The scale is divided into nine dimensions, such as clarity, accuracy, accuracy, depth, breadth, importance, relevance, logic and fairness. The scale has five grades, namely, very poor, poor, average, good and very good. Finally, students’critical thinking skill is judged according to the scale. According to the performance of students’participation in classroom activities, the formative assessment scores are given.

Some suggestion on the new model

As the implementer of the new teaching model, teachers should change their ideas and attach importance to the role of critical thinking in the writing process. Teachers are advised to abandon the traditional writing teaching view that the only target of students’writing is fluency and accuracy. Secondly, the ideological depth and breadth of teachers will have a direct impact on the development of students’critical thinking skills. Therefore, teachers should constantly improve their own critical thinking skills to meet the requirements of cultivating students’skills in English teaching. In addition, as participants in classroom activities, teachers should set up more diversified teaching activities, encourage students to think and analyze problems from different levels and angles, organize students to discuss, cooperate, question, debate with each other making critical thinking be integrated into every section of writing teaching. In terms of content proportion, teachers can constantly adjust the proportion of language knowledge teaching and critical thinking skills training in the writing class to achieve the goal of imperceptibly instilling in the students’the importance of critical thinking. Finally, students should be encouraged to read a lot, and closely associate reading and writing with critical thinking skills. Reading is a process of input. A lot of effective reading helps students broaden their horizon and learn to look at things in a macro and diversified way. Therefore, teachers should guide students to do a lot of extracurricular Chinese and English reading, and encourage students to fulfill in-depth reading and independent thinking. A large number of effective extracurricular reading will help students to understand, analyze and judge in depth when facing writing tasks, and have a macro perspective when establishing the theme of the composition, and write articles with ideas.

Conclusion

The follow-up research of teaching reform in this study can be carried out in the following two directions.

Firstly, large scale teaching experiments should be carried out. How to design the courses for students in their respective colleges and universities, whether the new teaching path is widely accepted by learners and educators, and whether students can simultaneously improve their language ability and critical thinking skills are the focus of subsequent research.

Secondly, compilation of textbooks. Nowadays, there are no writing and critical thinking textbooks specifically for public foreign language courses in China’s colleges and universities, so how to compile textbooks suitable for non-English major students is the premise and basis for conducting teaching experiments. The compilation of textbooks should aim at development of critical thinking skills, take writing skills as the main line, and arrange chapters according to different themes.

It is hoped that this study can provide ideas and inspiration for the reform of public foreign language teaching in colleges and universities, give full play to the role of writing teaching in developing students’critical thinking skills, and achieve “inspiring thinking by writing, promoting writing by thinking”.