Application Of Critical Thinking In English Reading Teaching In Senior High School

Nowadays, more and more researchers believe that reading is not only a cognitive activity but also a social activity. Readers will receive both the information in reading materials and the writer’s opinion when they are reading. In the modern information age, all kinds of opinions are bombed in people’s head, and it is necessary to analyze these opinions’values.The application of critical thinking in reading is the best way to help people analyze all sorts of opinions. Because critical reading is a high level of reading, it requires that readers comprehend the reading materials and form their own reasonable opinions by adopting critical reading strategies, such as prediction, analysis, and self-exam. People with critical thinking are also the creative intellectuals.The development of society needs the creative intellectuals. And cultivating students’ critical thinking is the goal of our country’s education, too. In Senior High School English Curriculum Standard (2001), students are required to be equipped with critical thinking and adopt critical thinking skill in reading.In recent years, the research on applying critical thinking in reading has eventually increased in number both at home and abroad. Most research in China focuses on how to train critical thinking in college. However, the research of applying critical thinking in Senior High School is a little.Listening, speaking, reading and writing are the basic skills of learning English. In College Entrance Examination, reading score is about30%in English test’s total score, so sometimes the proportion of reading score may influence students’whole achievement.Actually, in the traditional English reading teaching, teachers frequently pay attention to improve students’reading level, but sometimes both teachers and students are not satisfied with the results. There are some problems in the past English reading teaching, for example, teachers spend too much time teaching new words and grammar, but they neglect to help students understand the reading material as a whole and hardly introduce the related background knowledge.In order to solve the problems in English reading teaching, the present study puts forward the application of critical thinking in English reading teaching in Senior High School and tries to explore how to use the mode of critical reading teaching to improve students’reading level. The author makes an experimental study which is carried out16weeks. Two natural classes in Grade One are chosen from Jing Zhou Beimen Senior High School, and each class has60students. One class is the experimental class which adopts the critical reading teaching and another is the control class which adopts the traditional reading teaching. The process of critical reading teaching in the experimental class can be as follows:1) teachers will help students sort out the background and lead them to predict the main idea of the text according to its title;2) students read quickly and evaluate their prediction;3) students discuss the topic of the text and express their own opinions. The process of traditional reading teaching is planned as follows:1) teachers will lead students to read new words;2) teachers explain language points and translate sentence by sentence;3) teachers ask students to complete the related exercise and explain it by translation.Both the qualitative and quantitative analyses are used in the experiment. The data is collected from the questionnaire, reading tests and the interview. All the subjects take part in two questionnaires which are the same in the contents before the experiment and after the experiment. According to the pre-questionnaire, we can find that there is no difference between the experimental class and the control class in reading interest and reading strategies. The post-questionnaire aims at investigating whether there is difference between the experimental class and the control class in reading interest and reading strategies after the experiment. At the same time, all the subjects take part in two reading tests which are chosen from the College Entrance Examination’s English reading comprehension to guarantee the validity and reliability. According to the pre-test’s result, we can find that there is no difference between the experimental class and the control class in reading level. Meanwhile, the author divides the subjects’ reading level into three levels according to their reading score:high reading level, moderate reading level and low reading level. The post-test aims at investigating whether there is difference between the experimental class and the control class in reading level after the experiment. In order to better know about the effect of critical reading teaching on the experiment class, the author chooses12students to make an interview.After analyzing the data by using SPSS15.0software, there are three main findings in the experiment as follows:First, both the critical reading teaching and the traditional reading teaching can improve students’reading achievement, but the effect of critical reading teaching is more obvious. Second, the achievement of students in different reading levels is varied:the achievement of students in high reading level and low reading level is not obvious while students in moderate reading level gain great progress. Finally, comparing with the mode of traditional reading teaching, the critical reading teaching can more improve students’ reading interest. Hence, the training of critical reading should be carried out in Senior High School in order to improve students’ reading ability.The present thesis is comprised of six chapters. The first chapter is a brief introduction to the background and significance of the present study. It mainly introduces why the author chooses this project. The second chapter is literature review of related research on critical thinking, reading comprehension and critical reading at home and abroad. The third chapter is related theories about critical thinking, reading comprehension and critical reading. This chapter mainly discusses the theory foundation of the present research. The forth chapter is about the research design including research questions, research subjects and research instruments. In order to check out whether applying critical reading in Senior High School is significant or not, the author will collect data from the questionnaire, reading tests and interview. The fifth chapter analyzes the data collected from the experiment. And the last chapter states the results of the present study, the limitations of present research and implications for further study.