128 / 2021-06-29 09:28:09

Using Teacher-student assessment to develop critical thinking and English writing abilities in Chinese higher education

critical thinking,EFL teaching,eacher-student collaborative assessment

Developing critical thinking ability is one of the highlighted goals in Chinese higher education. The study thus used a quasi-experiment to find how the teacher-student collaborative assessment (TSCA) affected critical thinking and English writing abilities of a sample of Chinese non-English majors from a comprehensive English course in a local university. 64 freshmen as the experimental group took TSCA after each writing task while the other 58 freshmen as a control group only received teacher’s analysis of the writing sample. After the training of five weeks, there was no significant difference between students in the experimental group and control group in the English writing test, the overall English language proficiency test, and the critical thinking assessment. A significant improvement was found between pre-test and post-test in English writing for both groups. Interestingly, compared with the pretest, there was also a significant increase in the post-test of the overall English test for the experimental group but not for the control group. Although there was no significance found in the critical thinking assessment, most of the participants in the experimental group reported that they improved their critical thinking ability in follow-on questionnaires. All these results could shed light on the teaching of critical thinking in EFL and the transferability of critical thinking from the general knowledge to the specific domain.