Adapting to Western Norms of Critical Argumentation and Debate

Abstract

The number of Chinese students coming to the UK to undertake postgraduate courses has been steadily growing over the past decades and comprises a large proportion of the international students at master’s level in the UK. 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. Critical-thinking theorists, such as Paul (1993), Ennis (1996) and Siegel (1988), advocate this type of thinking as the highest form of reasoning for all human beings, though critics argue that this is an ethnocentric view, and that different cultures employ and value different styles of reasoning (Gee, 1994; Street, 1994).