Application Of Critical Thinking In College English Reading Teaching

Critical thinking，as one of the hottest issues in the educational circles，has received greatattention in the United States and other western countries since1980s. It not only plays a reallyvital role in the intellectual development and personnel training but also is very essential tocultivate students’ creative spirit and innovational competence. Critical thinking teaching hasbecome one of the core skills and aims of the higher education. So attention should be paid to theuniversity students’ cultivation of critical thinking.Reading as one of the four basic skills which readers are required to master, plays a vitalrole in language learning. It is an important way for students to acquire language knowledge,enlarge vocabulary and improve language proficiency. Reading teaching is an important part offoreign language teaching, and college English reading teaching is an indispensable part ofcollege English teaching. But examining the present situation of our college English readingteaching, teachers put emphasis on explaining vocabulary and grammar, and ignore the analysis,comprehension and evaluation of reading material. This kind of teaching mode merely putsemphasis on training students’ linguistic knowledge and language skills, so it hinders students’critical thinking ability.This research tries to cultivate students’ critical thinking ability and improve students’reading proficiency by applying critical thinking into college English reading teaching. In theresearch, the author adopts the empirical method to demonstrate three research hypotheses:Firstly, the application of critical thinking has a positive effect on college English reading.Secondly, the application of critical thinking in college English reading will promote thestudents’ reading comprehension strategies. Thirdly, the application of critical thinking in collegeEnglish reading can stimulate students’ learning interest and autonomy.In order to check out the feasibility and validity of the experimental teaching method incollege English reading teaching, the author makes a quasi-experiment in college English readingclasses for about16weeks. The subjects in the experimental study are80sophomores majoringin Law from two natural classes of Linyi University. The two natural classes all consists of40students. The author randomly chooses one as the experimental class and the other as the controlclass, and adopts the experimental teaching method to teach the experimental class and thetraditional teaching method to teach the control class. In order to make the experiment moreconvincing, the instruments utilized in this study include the pre-questionnaire, pre-test, post-test,post-questionnaire and an interview. After the teaching experiment, the author processes theexperimental data by the software SPSS and makes a detailed analysis of the results. The data analysis shows that compared with the control class, students in the experimentalclass, their reading interest, reading scores and reading proficiency have a significantimprovement after one term’s critical thinking training. Therefore, it can be concluded that underthe guidance of critical thinking, students’ reading ability can be improved.As an attempt on application of critical thinking, this research has made some beneficialachievements. But the research still has some deficiencies because of some subjective andobjective reasons, and needs a further research and improvement.