Cultivation Of Thinking Traits In High School English Reading Class

Thinking traits are the characteristics of a person’s thinking. The new curriculum reform in China puts great emphasis on the cultivation of students’ thinking traits. It has been generally accepted that language and thinking are interdependent and reciprocal.Therefore, many scholars believe that English classes can help cultivate students’thinking traits, and accordingly have included thinking traits as one of the key qualities to be cultivated in the English subject.Some research has been conducted on how to cultivate students’ thinking traits in class and its effectiveness. On the whole, however, the research in this area is relatively scarce and has the following three limitations. Firstly, most researchers focus on their improvement of teaching designs; few have done empirical studies to verify the effectiveness of their reform. Secondly, researchers tend to focus on the scientific subjects, such as mathematics, physics and chemistry, and pay little attention to the language subjects. Thirdly, most researchers explore the strategy of cultivating thinking traits based on the five aspects of thinking traits: profundity, flexibility, criticalness,originality and agility. Unfortunately, these five traits are not directly related to classroom activities, so that researchers have mostly failed to provide well-targeted and practicable teaching strategies. In view of the above inadequacies, the present study, based on Bloom’s Taxonomy of Educational Objectives and prior research achievements related to the cultivation of thinking traits, explores how to cultivate students’ thinking traits in high school English reading class. It also uses test results and interviews to verify the effectiveness of the methods. The study involves the following five major research questions:(1) Which kinds of activities can be used to cultivate the different levels of students’thinking traits based on the six dimensions of Bloom’s Taxonomy of the cognitive process?(2) How can we cultivate the six dimensions of thinking traits in high school English reading class?(3) What changes take place in students’ thinking traits after the teaching experiment?(4) Do sex and initial level of students’ thinking traits influence the extent of improvement?(5) Are there any connections among the six dimensions of thinking traits?The first two questions will be elaborated on through the presentation of teaching activities and a teaching case, while the analysis of the rest of the three will be based on the results of tests on students’ thinking traits. The study includes teaching activities design,pre-experiment and post-experiment tests on thinking traits, and a semi-structured interview. Subjects for this study were the 40 students from Class 1 Senior 2 in Tianjin Xiaozhan No.l Middle School, and then 15 of them were randomly chosen for the interview.The results showed that the students made significant progress in the post-experiment test, and that training in understanding, applying and creating had a significant effect on the improvement of students’ thinking traits. In spite of the fact that the students who did better in the pre-experiment test made less progress, they still took the lead in the post-experiment test. Besides, No significant difference was found in students’ thinking traits between two genders. Instead,the results from the interviews showed that learning initiative and family education affected the development of students’ thinking traits. In addition, significant connections were found among the six dimensions of students’ thinking traits. Applying was closely correlated to remembering,and has a connection with analyzing and understanding as well; evaluating is of medium positive correlation to creating.Based on the above findings, the present author offers four suggestions on how to cultivate students’ thinking traits in high school English reading class: 1. English teachers should attach importance to the necessity and feasibility of cultivating the thinking traits;2. Teachers should consider individual differences, such as the initial level of thinking traits, learning initiative, family background, when they design teaching activities to cultivate students’ thinking traits; 3. Teachers may exploit the positive correlations among understanding, applying and analyzing, and then improve students’ performance in evaluating and creating; 4. Teachers ought to follow the principles of diversity,explicitness and persistence when choosing teaching activities.