Action Research On Improving Senior High School Students’ Reading Proficiency By Critical Thinking Training

Critical thinking has been attached more and more importance to in language teachingsince it is one of the most important skills for students to improve reading. The High SchoolEnglish Curriculum Requirements require the cultivation of students’ critical thinking ability.In China, the students’ general proficiency in English reading is low, and it is in great need ofimprovement. In the past two decades, there were many researches and practices done aboutthe methodology of critical thinking both at home and abroad.The research aims at finding outthe relationship between critical thinking training and students’ deductive, analytic ability andtheir reading proficiency in the theoretical framework of Schema Theory and Critical Discour-se Analysis Theory. The research questions are:(1) Can critical thinking training improve lea-rners’ deductive and analytic ability in reading?(2) Can critical thinking training improve lea-rners’ reading proficiency?The research used action research design with participants of52students from ClassTwo, Senior Three, Guangdong Overseas Chinese High School and it lasted for nearly fourmonths. The critical thinking training was divided into two stages. In stage one, aquestionnaire and a pre-test were carried out for problem identification and the students weretrained for two months. After that, an interview and a periodical reading test were carried outand results were collected and analyzed by SPSS for the author’s reflections. In stage two, thecritical thinking training lasted for about two months, during which period the author carriedout another interview and made ongoing reflections. Through questionnaires about criticalthinking skills, interviews with the participants and the analysis of the scores of the periodicalreading tests plus reading comprehension tests, we came to a conclusion that the students’deductive and analytic ability improved, which resulted in the achievement of readingproficiency.Implications derived from this research suggest that critical thinking training activitieslike title analysis, words inference, main idea analysis, reading between and beyond lines,discussing and evaluating the passage and writing summary of the passage are effectiveconnection to students’ reading comprehension ability, which will help students improve theirreading proficiency.