An Experimental Study On Critical Reading In Junior High School English Teaching

Because of the disadvantages of traditional reading and the promotion of the theory ofcritical thinking, English teaching of junior high school is faced with many challenges andopportunities. With the development of information technology, people need to use criticalreading to analyze and tell whether the information they get is true or not. It is believed thatreading plays an important role to acquire different kinds of information. The teachers canfind in English Curriculum Standards that critical reading can improve the abilities of thestudents’ reading and contribute to the development of their critical thinking. The junior highschool students are influenced by the reading materials easily and they do not have their ownideas, so reading critically can be taught in English reading class. This thesis is dedicated toprove that critical reading taught in English reading classes can improve the students’reading comprehension abilities and increase students’ reading interest.According to the classroom observation in the English reading classes, teachers focusmore on the words, phrases and language points, while they pay less attention to the meaningor the purpose of the writer. As a result, students only remember some words, phrases orsentences. Data of interview and the questionnaires show that most students have littlereading interest. They know little about reading strategies and they have weak readingabilities.In order to develop students’ skimming abilities and learn more about the writers’writing purposes, the most important thing is that the students should not only be made toremember the words or the phrases. However，how to achieve that depends on the teacher.Changing their thought and ways to teach is the main thing.This thesis aims to find out the main problems in junior high school students’ reading.The experiment also aims to prove whether and how critical reading can help to solve thoseproblems.This thesis is based on the research of the critical reading abroad and in China, and thepresent experiment of critical reading aims to explore the ways to carry out critical reading.This experiment lasts one year or so from September,2012to July,2013. The subjects are one hundred and eight students in Shijiazhuang Foreign Language Studies School. Theteacher in the experimental class makes use of critical reading, while the teacher in the otherone uses the traditional way to teach. It applies three instruments including an interview, aquestionnaire and a reading comprehension test.The experiment proves that many students know more about the reading strategies andthey will use them to read and deal with the reading materials by themselves and the readingspeed is faster than before. Besides, critical reading can really help students to improve theirthinking abilities, especially their predicting abilities. What’s more, the way of reading has adifferent influence on different students. Due to the way, the intermediate level students canmake great progress. Lastly, most students are satisfied with this reading method.In all, critical reading plays a very important role of improving students’ readingabilities and critical thinking.