No abstract

Abstract-There is a heated debate over whether critical thinking can be taught in the educational field for the reasons that its definition is seldom comprehensively given and universally accepted by the academia, as well as its value and impacts on the development of learners' critical thinking skills. Focusing on the practical use of critical thinking, the main concern in this paper is whether critical thinking can be taught, particularly in an EFL classroom. The reflection on several conceptions and characteristics of critical thinking will be firstly introduced. When discussing these accounts, the reasons that why it is challenging to teach critical thinking as well as why it can be taught in previous relevant literature will be presented. Then the current situations of critical thinking skills taught in the classroom, taking a Chinese EFL classroom for an example, will be illustrated and finally the reasons why it is popular as a tool in teaching and learning will be discussed.

The aim of this paper is to reveal how native and non-native speaker EFL (English as a foreign language) teachers influence students' levels of Foreign Language Anxiety (FLA) in classrooms. Researchers in the area of second and foreign language acquisition have long been studying the role that anxiety plays among foreign language learners. Their findings are reported and analyzed in the first part of this paper. Then, research methodology is presented on two groups of students (180 in total)of whom 90 is in NS (Native Speaker) class and 90 in NNS (Non-Native Speaker) class taking English as a foreign language course for 4 hours a week at one university in China.