An Exploration into Chinese EFL Students’ Critical Thinking

DOI

10.2991/sser-18.2018.159How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Critical Thinking in English classes; Critical Thinking Dispositions; Critical Thinking Skills; Measurement

Abstract

When English educators appeal for more efforts to develop college students’ critical thinking in English classes, gaining a full understanding how much their critical thinking ability has achieved seems to be an indispensable task. This study applies Critical Thinking Disposition Survey (CTDS) and Critical Thinking Skills Tests (CTST) to measure Chinese EFL students’ critical thinking abilities. The results show that those students have weak disposition to think critically??"with low passion to pursue truths and facts, little awareness to embrace innovative ideas, and scant confidence to frankly communicate, but show strong inspiration for new knowledge. Meanwhile, they are not proficient in fundamental and advanced levels of critical thinking skills??"lack of judgment, application and analysis, but are surprisingly adept in some sub-skills. Probing into the status of their critical thinking in English is of great value for empirical researches into developing their critical thinking, and also for practices of nurturing innovation and entrepreneurship as well.

Copyright

© 2018, the Authors. Published by Atlantis Press.

Open Access

This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY-NC license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/).

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Suyun Xu
PY  - 2018/05
DA  - 2018/05
TI  - An Exploration into Chinese EFL Students’ Critical Thinking
BT  - Proceedings of the 2018 8th International Conference on Social science and Education Research (SSER 2018)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 754
EP  - 760
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/sser-18.2018.159
DO  - 10.2991/sser-18.2018.159
ID  - Xu2018/05
ER  -