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ments. In other words, students cannot think critically when writing in English. Thus, to develop students’ critical thinking skills, teachers should rethink the learning objectives, instructional strategies, homework and exam formats, and the overall process of teaching writing courses. 

Chapter 2  Literature Review

2.1 Critical Thinking Ability

2.1.1 The Definition of Critical Thinking

The word “critical” came into English in the middle period of the sixteenth century. It derives from two Greek roots. They are “kriticos” and “criterion,” which mean “discerning judgment” and “standard,” respectively. Etymologically speaking, “critical thinking” refers to using appropriate evaluation standards, thinking consciously, and finally making a reasonable judgment (Paul & Elder, 2006).  

The concept of critical thinking stems from Western culture. It can go back to a method of thinking advocated by the ancient Greek Socrates, who supported that teachers should ask students a series of questions to lead them to their answer to the questions they are pondering rather than giving them answers directly. This kind of method inspires students to think deeply in the form of debate, which is very helpful in improving students’ critical thinking ability. Moreover, the modern concept of critical thinking derives from “reflective thinking” by Dewey, the father of the “Modern Critical Thinking Movement.” He defined “reflective thinking” as “Active, persistent, and careful consideration of any belief or supposed form of knowledge in the light of the grounds that support it, and the further conclusions to which it tends (Dewey, 1933).” He emphasized that the best way to solve a problem is to think seriously and repeatedly. Thinking is the process of ruminating, contemplating, inspecting, and examining to discover something new or develop fresh knowledge of what is already known. Under the influence of Dewey, a large number of discussions and researches on what critical thinking is have emerged. 

2.2 Theoretical Support for the Research

2.2.1 Production-oriented Approach

It is a widely held view that text-centered instruction and task-centered instruction are the two main pedagogical methods used in English language teaching in China. The task-centered instruction can be further divided into Bottom-up text-centered instruction and Top-down text-centered instruction. However, Bottom-up text-centered instruction pays too much attention to individual language items without encouraging students to produce extended discourse for meaningful communication; Top-down text-centered instruction places too much emphasis on a text’s meaning without providing students with opportunities to apply the linguistic structures they have learned directly; the task-centered instruction focuses on students’ use of English, ignoring their input of new linguistic forms, which can’t expand students’ language system (Wen Qiufang, 2018b). In a word, the text-centered instruction gets input without output, and the task-centered instruction gets output without input. Production-oriented Approach (POA) is proposed as a potential remedy for overcoming the deficiency in text-centered or task-centered instruction. It starts teaching with language production and ends with production, while input serves as an enabler to help accomplish productive本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。