Research Of The Application Of Critical Reading Strategies In English Teaching In Senior High School

Not only does English reading class help students understand the basic language and information, but also it helps them think deeply about the text,concern the opinions, emotional feelings, characteristic attitudes and intents of the writer. Meanwhile, it is vital for students to grasp the main ideas and structures and to have a good knowledge of phrases and sentences. Thus, it’s likely that they can enjoy the language and culture.However, in China, most of the current English reading classes take a similar teaching pattern, through which after letting students simply read the text on the surface, teachers teach the language points of the reading material.The ways to test students are always some true or false questions, multi-choice tests, blank-filling tests, searching-for-main-idea tests. Because those methods of test are quite rigid, students cannot understand the information conveyed by the text adequate enough. As a result, students become passive information receivers and have no chance to get involved into the text. There is a fact that most of them even know nothing about what they have read.The fostering of CT is also expounded in the English Curriculum Standard of Senior High School. During English teaching process, CR is animportant way to cultivate CT in reading teaching. However, many teachers mostly work at explaining the language points. They do not conduct CRT.Also the fostering of CT is not put enough emphasis in the current English reading teaching. The reading strategies and CT abilities of students cannot be well developed.This paper tries to figure out whether put the critical reading strategy into practice can improve students’ reading capability and improve their interest in learning English or not. The subject of this experiment is two classes of grade two in Daqi No.1 Middle School, and they were taught and trained how to read critically for three month with pre-test and post-test to check their reading ability and questionnaire to check their change of interest in English. The results show that after the study and training of critical reading, they had an improvement in their marks and more interested in English than they used to be.As a result, the author concludes that it is significant to instruct high school students how to read critically. Developing students’ critical reading capability can not only reinforce the reading capability of theirs and their passion in learning English, but also lay a sordid foundation for their creative study and work in the future, and meet the requirement that “shift from teacher-oriented to student-oriented, from the mode that aims at exams to themode that aims at quality” during the reform of education in China.