A Research On Developing Critical Thinking Skills In English Teaching For Senior High School Students

So far,critical thinking has become an important education aim for cultivating potential international citizens,and it has been one of the hot topics in domestic foreign language teaching research.As an important kind of language input,reading plays an important role in English learning.In view of the close ties between language and thinking,the needs are increasingly urgent for the current reading course to shoulder its responsibility to develop students' critical thinking and there is an inevitable trend of English language teaching and research to improve students' critical thinking ability through reading instruction.In this paper,based on the framework of critical thinking skills in Delphi Report,the questionnaire is constructed,which is on developing critical thinking skills in English teaching for senior high school students,then later used to implement investigation in 190 high school English language teachers from S city,J,Z province and so on.Research contents include: the overall level of cultivating students' critical thinking skills,the cultivation of sub-skills,cultivation differences in terms of teacher factors and the obstacles of students' critical thinking development.Then 21 English languange courses are observed so to get related statistics.Combined with interviews,research findings are further analysed.Finally,conclusions are reached and suggestions for English language teaching are made.The research findings are as follows: the overall level of critical thinking skills training is general;the training of sub-skills is unbalanced;the cultivation of thinking skills is related to the education levels of teachers and regional factors;there are significant differences in cultivating critical thinking skills if teachers are at different education levels,in different regions or have different professional titles;the differences are not significant in terms of teachers' ages,teaching ages,schools,etc.The cultivation of students' critical thinking skills is affected by multiple factors,among which the students' low level of language and little class time for thinking training are the two main obstacles.According to the above research results,the author suggests that to facilitate students' critical thinking skills development through English reading,teaching objectives should be refined,process evaluation promoted,teacher growth foucsed on and exterior support emphasized.