Abstract:

The paper reports a comparative study of critical thinking skills between English majors and other liberal arts majors in China for the purpose of testifying whether the English majors are inferior to the other liberal arts majors in critical thinking abilities. 2189 first-year,second-year and third-year students from 11 universities and 14 specialties participated in the study where all the participants were required to take a critical thinking test. In the data analysis,three comparisons were made to find out the overall difference between the two groups of students,the difference between the two groups by grade and the patterns of difference across the three grades between the two groups. It was found that generally the critical thinking abilities of the first group are significantly better than the second one,but the gap diminishes with the increase of grade. Both groups were shown significant progress across the grades,but the progress of the first group is slower,compared with the second group whose critical period was between the 2nd and 3rd year.