An Evaluation Of An Intensive Reading Textbook For English-major Students Language And Culture From The Critical Thinking Perspective

In this challenging age characterized by the information explosion,the ability to think critically is deemed a major goal of contemporary education.In recent years,an educational reform has taken place in the education of the English major students in one university in Beijing.One of the guiding principles of this reform is to cultivate students’ critical thinking ability.Under this background,new textbooks with critical thinking orientation were designed and put into use.The current study sought to evaluate a newly-designed intensive reading textbook Language and Culture(Sun et al.,2015)from the critical thinking perspective in order to find out how the textbook design could possibly achieve the objective of cultivating students’ critical thinking ability and what were the textbook users’ opinions toward the textbook in terms of cultivating students’ critical thinking.After reviewing the theoretical models of critical thinking,a new framework of critical thinking skills,consisting of the skills of analyzing,evaluating,inferring,explaining,and self-regulating was generated for the present textbook evaluation.This newly generated framework was applied to the in-depth analysis of the textbook to find out the representations of critical thinking skills in the textbook.Two questionnaires were constructed in order to find out how the textbook users,both teachers and students,perceive the textbook in regard to cultivating critical thinking in the real teaching and learning processes.Semi-structured interviews with teachers were also conducted to further investigate into the issue.The results showed that:1.The design of the textbook lived up to its claim of cultivating students’ CT skills,with the tasks requiring CT skills accounting for 77.4%of all the tasks in the textbook.Among these CT skills,analyzing was the most frequent CT skill required by the tasks,and self-regulating was the least frequent.2.As to the textbook users’ perceptions of the textbook,the results of the questionnaires and interviews showed the textbook users’ positive attitudes toward the target textbook in general.The data showed that there were no significant differences between different groups of students in terms of their perceptions of the textbook’s training of CT skills,indicating that the cultivation of CT skills may not need to be differentiated between these different groups of students.The data also reflected that the students’ perceptions differ significantly depending on the class differences in terms of the textbook’ s training of CT skills.Strengths and weaknesses of the textbook were discussed according to the results and implications were offered accordingly:1.The proportion of tasks training the CT skill of self-regulating need to be increased in order to better facilitate students’critical thinking development.2.Explicit instructions of CT standards need to be provided in order to guide the students in their task performances and help the teachers to give constructive feedback to the students.3.Students need to be guided to improve their autonomous learning ability and instructions should be provided to help the students improve their language awareness.Findings of this study may provide valuable feedback for the textbook compilers as to the improvement of the textbook for better effect of cultivating students’ critical thinking,and for the teachers who are going to use this textbook in terms of the adaptation of the textbook to achieve better teaching effect.