Investigating Critical Thinking And Writing Proficiency: The Case Of Master Students At The English Department Of Mmuto

Résumé: The present study is mainly concerned with the investigation of the relationship between the critical thinking ability and the writing proficiency of advanced EFL students: A case of Master students at the English Department of MMUTO. It attempts to determine the extent to which Master students rely on Critical Thinking strategies in their writing of examination essays and to glean some insight on the way they view Critical Thinking and its importance when writing their essays. The research goes deeper to detect the factors related to either promoting or obstructing the critical thinking capacity of Master students. As for the analytic categories of the study, they are borrowed from a theory put forward by Paul Richard and Linda Elder in their The Miniature Guide to Critical Thinking – Concepts and Tools (2008). A mixed-method approach is adopted, combining quantitative and qualitative procedures for data gathering and data analysis. In terms of data collection, the study takes a sample as a textual corpus made up of fifty Master examination essays. Besides, the research work relies on a questionnaire distributed to fifty Master students of different specialties. To analyze the data collected, our research adopts the rule of three and Excel software to process the quantitative data and Qualitative Content Analysis (QCA) for the interpretation of the qualitative data. The findings of our study indicate that Master students are aware of the importance of critical thinking in academia, and they partially integrate it – though in a very limited way - in their essay writing. The research work ends up with a brief examination of the main factors related to deficits in students’ sense of criticality

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