Good critical thinking ability not only enables us to comprehensively understand things and make rational judgments, but also enables us to break the routine, think creatively and develop our personality. English argumentative writing is an effective way to cultivate critical thinking ability. This study uses corpus analysis and SPSS to analyze the relationship between students' critical thinking ability and their English essay writing level. The results show that: (1) students as a whole have a tendency towards positive critical thinking; (2) the dimensions of students’ critical thinking ability are, in descending order, curiosity, justice, openness, truth-seeking, cognitive maturity, analytical, resilience and confidence; (3) the correlation coefficient is 0.482, which means they are positively correlated. Based on the above findings, some valuable suggestions for optimization of English writing teaching are put forward accordingly.

Wen Gong. An Empirical Study on the Correlation between Critical Thinking Ability and L2 Argumentative Writing Competence. Frontiers in Educational Research (2022) Vol. 5, Issue 2: 89-95. https://doi.org/10.25236/FER.2022.050217.

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