An Empirical Study Of Critical Reading Teaching In The EFL Classroom

Critical reading is a very high-level comprehension of written materials requiring interpretation, analysis and evaluation skills that enable readers to separate important from unimportant information, distinguish between facts and opinions, and determine a writer’s purpose and tone so as to infer implied meanings, to fill in information gaps, and to draw logical conclusions. Critical reading is an important way to cultivate critical thinking ability in reading teaching and it’s of vital necessity for informational society and higher education. Scholars abroad and at home have made fruitful achievements on critical reading, but empirical researches on critical reading teaching at home is relatively few.On the basis of related researches on critical reading abroad and at home, this study conducts an experiment of critical reading teaching, which aims to prove that compared to the traditional reading teaching, critical reading teaching is more effective to cultivate students’critical thinking ability, and to provide useful reference for English reading teaching.The instructional experiment lasts for one semester, and two classes of English majoring freshmen students are involved as subjects in Hunan First Normal College. One is experimental group in which critical reading teaching is adopted, and the other is control group in which the original reading teaching method is still used. The data is collected from two questionnaires, one critical reading pretest paper, one posttest paper, and interviews with the teacher and students, which are statistically processed and analyzed by SPSS21.0.Major findings are summarized as follows through quantitative and qualitative analysis. The present situation of reading teaching in the EFL classroom is not satisfactory. On one hand, students have weak intention of reading critically in their study. On the other hand, the teacher pays insufficient attention to the cultivation of students’critical thinking ability in designing reading teaching activities. In addition, both the questionnaires and the reading tests show that critical reading teaching is more conductive than the traditional reading teaching method in promoting students’critical reading comprehension ability and critical thinking ability. What’s more, both the teacher and the students in the experimental group are satisfied with critical reading teaching.This study provides some valuable implications for college English reading teaching. As a guide and a collaborator, teachers should realize the significance of critical reading, strengthen students’critical reading intention, constantly update knowledge to design related critical reading activities, and try to arouse students’learning interests and to cultivate their critical thinking ability. What’s more, critical reading test should be paid attention to and constant training of critical reading skills should also be taken into consideration.