A Study On The Improvement Of Students’ Critical Thinking Ability With Question-based English Reading Instruction

As the economic and technological development,students are confronted with the world of information explosion.Critical thinking ability contributes to helping students identify the information.However,traditional English teaching has been focusing on the language knowledge input,and neglecting students’ critical thinking training.Critical thinking(CT)can provoke students’ questioning,criticizing and reflecting.Critical thinking can be integrated with reading to help students construct what they have learned.The question itself implicates questioning and reflection to the text and question-based instruction guides students to dig out the meaning of the text,thus interpreting the text deeply.The research aims at enhancing students’ critical thinking ability by question-based English reading instruction,thus some problems presented in reading can be solved,such as lacking of clarity,relevance,logic and depth.This study makes an experiment on the critical thinking in English reading class XiangNing NO.1 senior middle school and intends to explore whether question-based English reading instruction can improve students’ critical thinking ability.It intends to answer the following questions:(1)According to the framework of CT ability,is there any significant difference in critical thinking ability after eighteen-week question-based English reading instruction? If yes,how are different scales of CT ability developed?(2)Is there any improvement in students’ reading ability after question-based instruction?(3)What are the perceptions of participants toward question-based instruction and CT after the experiment?This research involves an eighteen-week teaching experiment with 98 subjects chosen from XiangNing NO.1 senior middle school.Meanwhile,98 subjects are from two parallel classes.50 students are from class70,and 48 students are from class71.The former is considered as control class,the latter is considered as experimental class.The research data are collected through two questionnaires and two reading tests before and after experiment,and interview is conducted after experiment.Question-based English reading instruction is emphasized in experimental group while explanation on grammar and vocabulary is stressed in control group.After the quantitative analysis with SPSS 19.0,the results indicate thatobvious differences have been found,especially in interpretation,analysis,and inference by comparing the quantitative data of the experimental class(EC)with the control class(CC)before and after experiment.Moreover,in terms of English reading,students in EC perform better than students in CC.The interview reflects subjects’ optimistic attitudes toward question-based English reading instruction and CT.The author comes to a conclusion that question-based English reading instruction is conducive to promote the cultivation of students’ critical thinking ability.At last,the author offered valuable classroom experiences for cultivating students’ critical thinking with question-based instruction and proposed some limitations about this study.