The Application Of Critical Reading Strategies In English Reading Teaching In Senior Middle Schools

As is clearly stated in English Curriculum for Senior Middle Schools (Experimental Version) (Education Ministry,2003), English teaching in senior high should put emphasis on the students’abilities of inferring the meanings of words through context, predicting author’s attitude and learning to analyze and solve problems in English, so that the creative and innovative thinking of students can be developed. However, in the teaching practice, the abilities mentioned above are not satisfying. The barrier of developing English reading ability for students does not lie in the lack of language itself, but in the shortage of the ability of deep-level reading.Critical reading doesn’t mean to memorize what to read, but to define what the author aims to convey by analyzing and integrating the questions and hypothesis raised in the process of reading. Meanwhile, critical reading is a process of forming new schema in the reader’s mind, when the reading contents are put under schema processing based on the reader’s own schema so that the reader can comment the reading contents critically beyond the information given by the author.After doing enough analyses on the relevant researches both at home and abroad, the author raised the hypothesis that using critical reading strategies can improve students’ reading ability effectively, and an empirical study was conducted in a high school in Changzhou. The experiment lasted one semester, from September,2013 to January,2014. In the experiment, altogether 94 students from Class 5 and Class 7, Senior 2 were selected. Class 7 acted as the experimental group while Class 5 was the control group. During the experiment, critical reading was applied to the experimental group while the control group was taught according to the traditional teaching method. Two questionnaires were conducted at the beginning and end of the experiment. Also, two tests were carried out separately in September,2013 and in January,2014. To ensure the justice between two groups, complementary teaching about critical reading to the control group was carried out from February to April,2014, and thus an extra test was given to two groups. All the statistics from the test were counted and analyzed in SPSS 19.0. Based on the analyses of the statistics, the research hypothesis proves right. That is, the application of critical reading to English reading teaching in senior school is of much benefit to improve students’ability of reading comprehension. Students’autonomy, cooperation, exploration and experience are highlighted during the reading process. Thus, critical reading can help students understanding the reading material further, expand their multi-thinking ability, and improve their reading strategies, reading interest and their reading ability.In English reading teaching in senior school, narrative writings and expository writings are two common genres. By analyzing the two teaching cases of the two genres to which critical reading strategies are applied, the concrete application of critical reading strategies to English reading teaching is stated and the common critical reading strategies, namely prediction, analysis, summary, inference, judgment and assessment, are summarized. Moreover, the basic process of applying critical reading to English reading teaching is concluded, which is "Deciding reading aims-Teaching design-Comprehension of the text-summary of the ideas-taking notes or questioning-comments on the author or the text-forming own opinion".