The Correlation Between High School Students' Critical Thinking Disposition And English Reading Comprehension

Since the middle of 20 th century,research on critical thinking has become a hot topic in western countries especially in America.Chinese scholars also have began to study critical thinking from the 1980 s,mainly focusing on theoretical research,psychology,logic,nursing and other fields,but a few studies applying critical thinking to the field of second language acquisition.Critical thinking includes critical thinking skills and critical thinking disposition.Although there are some researches about the relationship between critical thinking disposition and English learning,they mostly focus on writing,listening and speaking,and the participants are mainly college students.For my limited information,studies of the correlation between critical thinking disposition and English reading comprehension are quiet few,and studies focusing on high school students are not enough.Therefore this situation gives the author of the thesis research space.This thesis aims to investigate the correlation between critical thinking disposition and English reading comprehension of high school students.And participants of this study are 98 senior two high school students from the Middle School Attached to Sichuan Normal University.The data from one questionnaire and one test is analyzed by SPSS 18.0,including descriptive analysis,independent sample t-test and correlation analysis.In this study,the main work of this thesis includes:(1)the characteristics of high school students' critical thinking disposition and differences of critical thinking disposition between science and liberal arts high school students;(2)the distribution of their English reading comprehension achievements and differences of English reading comprehension achievements between science and liberal arts high school students;(3)the correlation between high school students' critical thinking disposition and English reading comprehension.Findings of the study are as follows: Firstly,high school students' critical thinking disposition is rather weak;the participants have weak disposition in Systematicity,Truth-seeking,Open-mindedness and Maturity,while they are relatively self-confident,inquisitive and analytical;there are statistically significant differences between science students and liberal art students of high school in Self-confidence,Analyticity and Open-mindedness.Secondly,high school students' English reading comprehension is at an intermediate level;high school students do best in Facts and details,Semantic comprehension and Theme topic,and they are poor in Reasoning and judgment;there is no statistically significant difference between science and liberal arts groups of high school in English reading comprehension.Thirdly,there is no statistically significant correlation between critical thinking disposition and English reading comprehension achievement among high school students even though there exist weak correlations among several components.The author of this thesis hopes that this study will provide some references for future research on English reading teaching or the relationship between critical thinking disposition and English reading comprehension.