A Study Of Question Design For Critical Reading In High School

Critical thinking is listed as one of the key abilities in the21stcentury. Therefore, it isimperative that critical reading be adopted. This paper has put forward measures to improvequestion design for critical reading (CR). First, teachers should recognize the essential CRstrategies and design questions and tasks based on these reading strategies. These strategies will laya solid foundation and facilitate students in other CR activities. Second, discourse analysis can beused in question design for CR. Some aspects could be considered: writing styles, title, thread,background information, role play, rhetoric devices and comparison between cultures or articles. Inthe process, teachers should pay attention to holistic reading strategies and foster independentcritical thinking ability. Third, this paper also explores the role of teachers in questions design.Teachers should first be an ordinary reader to make a conversation with the author and his article.Then they should read from students’ perspective to detect their potential barrier and interest inreading. Finally teachers should be a facilitator to design questions and tasks to help studentsbecome critical readers. In this paper, a comparative experiment is conducted and the results of theSPSS analysis have shown that through the implementation of improved question designs inreading class, students’ comprehension, appreciation and evaluation of the reading material haveimproved significantly.This paper is only a tentative attempt on question design for CR. In the research process,through a comparison between Chinese and western text books and question designs, I found somany differences in the approaches to both CR and CT. Researches remain to be done in this area.