Cultivating critical thinking dispositions in EGAP courses: The importance of teaching materials selection

Designers and instructors of English for General Academic Purposes (EGAP) courses aim to integrate critical thinking into the curriculum but often lack actionable strategies. To address this challenge, our study proposed and evaluated strategies for selecting teaching materials that instructors can readily implement. We recruited 853 graduate students enrolled in EGAP courses in China and collected data on their critical thinking dispositions at four different time points with an eight-week interval. Along with the four-wave data collection, we also collected information on students' prior test grades and teachers' use of discipline-specific, latest research-related teaching materials to build a nonlinear conditional latent growth model. The results showed that students' critical thinking dispositions exhibited temporal growth within the EGAP course context. Furthermore, with students' prior test grades controlled, exposure to discipline-specific, latest research-related materials in EGAP courses promoted the temporal growth of students’ critical thinking dispositions. Implications for cultivating critical thinking through EGAP instruction, particularly in Chinese educational contexts, are discussed. • Critical thinking dispositions (CTD) grow nonlinearly in EGAP courses. • Prior English achievement does not predict the growth of CTD. • Discipline-specific teaching materials enhance CTD during EGAP courses. • Latest research-related teaching materials enhance CTD during EGAP courses. • The growth of CTD slows down after the EGAP courses.