Abstract

The number of Chinese students coming to the U.K. to undertake postgraduate courses has been steadily growing over the past decades and comprises a large proportion of the international students at masters level in the U.K. Given their importance to the income and culture of UK universities, it is important to research the difficulties and challenges many students encounter in adapting to Western style critical argumentation and debate. Critical debate is a defining concept in western universities, and is rooted in the Socratic/Aristotelian pursuit and discovery of ‘truth’ through the disciplined process of critical thinking. Modern day critical thinking theorists (Paul 1994; Ennis 1996 and Siegel 1988), advocate this type of thinking as the highest form of reasoning for all human beings, though critics strongly argue that this is an ethnocentric view, and that different cultures employ and value different styles of reasoning (Gee 1994; Street 1994; Thayer-Bacon 1993; Orr 1989).

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