A Study On The Correlation Between Critical Thinking Disposition Of Senior High School English Teachers And Their Classroom Questions Design

Critical thinking includes two dimensions,which are critical thinking skill and critical thinking disposition.Critical thinking skills involve a person's thinking about all aspects of life including learning,working,and living,while critical disposition affects people about how they will pay attention to their own critical thinking skills and the degree of attention.Critical thinking disposition is not a thinking process,but it can determine whether the process is beneficial to the healthy growth of individuals or the interests of others and society or not(Wen,Zhang,2016).Being a qualified critical thinker,a teacher would better facilitate students' critical thinking.Teachers' attitude towards critical thinking and the actions taken on it are also important factors which affect their development of critical thinking(Liu,Dong & Li,2013).Questioning in classroom is an indispensable means of teaching at all levels of classroom.It is common knowledge that the strategy that can have the greatest impact on student thinking is teacher questioning(Clasen,1990).Therefore,the core of this study is to explore the relationship between the critical disposition of high school English teachers and the design of classroom questions based on the Bloom's classification.The research questions are as follows: 1)How is the critical thinking disposition of English teachers in Senior High school? 2)How is the English teachers' ability of classroom question design based on category of questions in classroom teaching? 3)Is there any correlation between the critical disposition and classroom questions design ability?This study was conducted into three steps,and subjects involved a total of 105 English teachers from different senior high schools in Yunnan Province.The descriptive statistics and correlation analysis are used to analyze the data.And through interviews,the following conclusions could be drawn:1)Overall level of teachers' critical thinking disposition presents positive trends.However,average scores of two dimensions of self-confidence(3.94)and maturity(3.99)are below 4 point,which means negative trends.Curiosity is relatively strong among the eight dimensions of critical thinking disposition which point is thehighest of 4.97,while self-confidence and maturity are relatively weak.2)Only 27% of questions are high-level questions which can stimulate students' critical thinking processes,and 84% of teachers' design of 45 subjects attach great emphasis on the input and practice of knowledge.3)There is no significant correlation between the proportion of the high critical thinking questions in the classroom question design and teachers' critical thinking disposition,but negative correlation with the factor of curiosity.Combined with qualitative research,teachers with low curiosity seem to prefer designing questions which can be taken easily in the classroom,with no real contribution to promoting students' critical thinking.According to the analysis and findings of this study,the author tries to give some suggestions to teachers' teaching and training.