Designing a Two-Phase Quantitative Writing Course Using Bloom’s Taxonomy

In an English-medium tertiary context in China, a challenge for writing instructors is to elicit their students to argue with academic sources in the essays. The reason for this problem is that Chinese students typically follow Chinese rhetorical traditions and rarely challenge others’ opinions when reading academic articles. On the other hand, when working on mathematical problems or answering questions based on mathematics, Chinese students can demonstrate very good critical thinking skills. Therefore, the author proposes to establish a quantitative writing course that uses statistics other than literary sources to engage Chinese students in higher-order thinking in the writing tasks. The author initiates such a course in his institute by aligning the course modules with quantitative analytical tasks and writing tasks at different levels of Bloom’s taxonomy [10], [13]. This paper explains the course syllabus to provide implications for writing instructors working in similar contexts.