A Research Of Senior High School Students’ English Critical Thinking Skills

With the tendency of globalization of economy in the whole world, the focus of the competition among countries has been transferred to the cultivation of talents.Cultivating the personal talents with innovative ability and creative spirit has been one of the main goals of worldwide education. Critical thinking skill is the precondition and basis of innovative thinking which is characteristic of innovative talents. Therefore, the cultivation of critical thinking skill is of great significance. Therefore, English teachers should take their own responsibility of cultivating English critical thinking skill in senior high school English teaching. Existing researches in our country mainly focused more on theory introduction and scale design, relatively less on systematic and empirical study.Theory introduction and scale use separately offered clear definition and existing problems. How to solve these problems became the core part in this study. Aiming at the present situation that senior high school students lack English critical thinking skill, this thesis is written to argue and explore the approaches to cultivating English critical thinking skill. Action Learning Theory and Multiple Intelligence Theory are used in the thesis. By categorizing the tasks and evaluating the difficulty degree, the study explores different approaches to cultivating different English critical thinking skills. Through a lot of field work and data analysis, this thesis has made deep exploration and produced some arguments of innovative and academic values.The first part of the thesis is introduction to introduce the background and origins of the research, especially pay attention to the reason why English critical thinking skill has become the key point of the world present education. By finding out the relationship between creation and innovation, the author finally found out that English critical thinking skill is the key point of the research.The second part is literature review. First the author summarizes the definition of critical thinking skill, and teases the related research about their advantages and disadvantages at home and abroad. Then the author in this study make the cultivation of English critical thinking skill is defined in the interpretation, analysis, evaluation,reasoning, and self reflection on a few core skills, especially pay special attention to the analysis, reasoning, and focused evaluation.The third part is the introduction of research design, it includes five parts: research questions, research subjects, research instruments, research procedures and data collection and analysis. The three questions are:(1) What’s the present situation of senior high school students’ English criticalthinking skill?(2) What causes this current situation of senior high school students’ Englishcritical thinking skill?(3) How to cultivate and improve senior high school students’ English criticalthinking skill through English teaching and learning procedure?The forth part is results and discussion. The first part is the analysis of senior highschool students’ English critical thinking skill, and the second part is the correlationanalysis between English critical thinking skill and English achievements. Through thisanalysis the author tries to find out the reasons which cause the current situation ofsenior high school students’ English critical thinking skill. This part includes sevenelements, that is, the search for the truth in English learning process, open-mindedthinking towards English culture, and ability of analysis in English reading,organizational capability of English text, self-confidence in English critical thinkingskill, intellectual curiosity towards English and cognitive maturity. The third part is abrief summary: the study shows that most students’ English critical thinking skill isgood but seldom of them have higher critical thinking skill.At last, the author summarized the major findings of the survey report followed bythe major findings of present study and limitations of the present study and suggestionsfor further study:(1) there is a request of cultivating English critical thinking skill in thesyllabus of English;(2) teachers should change the traditional standard of measuringstudents, enable the idea of critical thinking skill be used in every step of teaching.