Macro-Structure of Argumentative Text as Manifestation of Chinese EFL Students' Critical Thinking Skills

Critical thinking cultivation has been regarded as one of the key objectives of tertiary education, which has drawn attention from the field of foreign language teaching in China. In contrast, the deficiency of critical thinking among English-major college students has become a heated-discussed issue in the past two decades. This study endeavored to combine two dimensions of argumentation: the nature of content and how it is organized, thus investigating the association between critical thinking skills manifested in each rhetorical move and EFL students' macro-structure of argumentative text. Both the move-structure approach based on Toulmin's model of argumentation and the text analysis approach were utilized to explore critical thinking skills manifested in each move. The findings show that participants had grasped the basic argumentative pattern (claim+ground) though lacking sufficient elaboration on evidence. But for secondary argumentative elements like counterargument and rebuttal, both quantity and quality lag the former. The most evident moves in the macro-structure of argumentative texts were introduction, claim, subclaim, ground, warrant, backing, counterargument, rebuttal, and conclusion. All in all, evaluation and inference critical thinking skills were the most evident in terms of composing a quality argumentation.