Research Background of critical thinking in EFL Instruction in chinaIn a long period, EFL teaching attached much importance to the accuracy of language and language skills training through mechanical memorizing, imitating, which lead to the ignorance of learners’ critical thinking development.
Since 1998, Chinese scholar Huang Yuanshen pointed out that “The absence of critical thinking among the English majors is ubiquitous, and this kind of phenomenon is becoming more and more serious”, it aroused more and more experts’ intense scholarly interest in the study the cultivation of critical thinking abilities in EFL, such as Wen Qiufang,Liu Runqing (2006), Huang Yuanshen (2008,2010), Li Liwen (2010),Dong Yuanxin (2010), Sun Youzhong (2011) etc. After 20 years’ studies of CT in foreign language teaching, Critical thinking has played a very important role in EFL instruction. Recently it has become a “hot topic” in foreign language teaching reform in China (Wen Qiufang, 2015) . The studies of the critical thinking in EFL in China mainly focus on:
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