A Study On The Application Of Critical Reading Strategies In English Reading Class Of Senior High School

Reading is an important part of foreign language acquisition and is a thinking activity as well. English teaching for senior high school aims to develop students’ abilities to analyze and solve problems, and to think critically. In the current reading teaching practice of senior high school, teaching vocabulary and grammar remains to be the focus, while higher-level reading training concerning predicting, inferring, summarizing, and etc, is rarely emphasized by the teachers and students. Students’ awareness of using reading strategies is not fully explored, and they are lacking reading training with critical reading strategies. Under such circumstances, students need not only to develop lower-level skills in reading, but to further master higher-level skills to arrive at a deeper understanding of the material on a text level, and to train their ability of deep thinking.Critical reading emphasizes that the reader connects his or her own experience and background knowledge with the author and the text, participates actively in reading, predicts and infers on the text, analyzes and confirms those predictions and inferences, so as to attain a deep comprehension of the text. Critical reading strategies are a combination of higher-level skills and skills to facilitate interaction between reader and text. Previous studies in this field have shown that applying critical reading strategies in college English reading class helps to improve students’ reading competence. Thus, the author attempts to test whether the application of critical reading strategies in reading teaching of senior high schools helps to raise students’ awareness of using reading strategies, improve their reading behaviors, and promote students reading competence.The experiment was conducted among a total of60students of two parallel classes from senior two, Tianjin Ruijing High School. The same questionnaire was given to both classes before and after the teaching. Data gathered from the two questionnaires were analyzed to study the change in students’ strategy using awareness and reading behaviors through the experiment. The results from pre-test and post-test were compared and studied to see whether the application of critical reading strategies in reading class has a positive effect on students’ reading competence.The thesis has drawn the following conclusions. Teaching reading based on critical reading strategies is an effective and feasible means of reading teaching. By participating in reading training based on critical reading strategies, students have significantly improved their ability to comprehend the text as a whole, and have become more aware of using the strategies while reading. Besides, they are more confident in reading and are more willing to carry out further reading practice.