An Experimental Study On Critical Reading Teaching Mode Of English Majors

Critical Reading (CR) refers to reading with view of questioning, and with logicanalysis, evaluation and integrating what you have read. At present in the academicfield, as a high-level reading activity with emphasis on readers’ active participation,CR has got more and more attention. One of the main cultivation objectives of theeducational institutions in the world is to develop students’ critical ability and criticalawareness. In modern EFL reading teaching and learning, being critical is the abilityfor readers to analyze the hidden facts or opinions in order to make reasonabledecisions and achieve high-level reading.As English has become the premier international language, the status of readingin EFL teaching and learning is becoming more and more important. However, inChinese EFL teaching and learning, English reading teaching is far from satisfactory,which still stays in the lower level and needs to be improved. With the constantimprovement of English proficiency of the English majors, they should have criticalreading ability. Therefore, based on critical reading and its related theories, this papertentatively put forward the Critical Reading Teaching Mode (CRTM), which is“students-centered, teacher-guided, critical reading skills-focused, and criticalawareness-cultivated”, in hope of giving some new enlightenments to the reform ofEnglish reading teaching.To examine the effectiveness of CRTM on EFL reading teaching, an empiricalstudy was conducted. The experiment was carried out in Foreign LanguagesDepartment of a College in Shijiazhuang, Which lasted for16weeks, with59sophomores of two parallel classes as its subjects. One class served as the ControlClass (CC), which was applied the traditional reading teaching method, while theother was the Experimental Class (EC), which was taught by the CRTM. Theexperimental study is a qualitative as well as quantitative study, in whichquestionnaires, reading test papers, and interviews are conducted to collect the data.All the data collected from the experiment are processed by SPSS13.0. The results ofthe study show that CRTM can increase awareness and frequency of strategy use; that CRTM can better improve English majors’ critical reading ability as well as generalreading ability than the traditional reading teaching; that CRTM has different effectson students of different levels with its better effect on mid-level students; and that thesubjects are mostly satisfied with CRTM.The findings from the experiment further verify the effectiveness of criticalreading teaching on improving the reading ability of English majors, and providereferences for further study and the generalization of CR. Besides, these findingsobviously demonstrated that it is feasible and valid to apply CRTM in EFL teachingand learning. It is hoped that further studies and discussions in depth on CR can bearoused in order to better improve the reading ability and CT ability of Englishmajors.