A Reflective Research On The Effectiveness Of CRT Model In The Rural Senior High School English Teaching

New Curriculum Standards for Senior High School English clearly point out that the cultivation of thinking quality is one of the core qualities of English discipline,which requires the students to be equipped with the critical thinking(CT)abilities to classify,summarize,analyze,guess,deduce and so on.The second language researchers have been devoted to exploring the teaching models aimed at cultivating the students' critical thinking abilities,for the proper teaching model may bring about a positive effect on language teaching and learning.However,in terms of critical reading teaching(CRT)model,a majority of researchers only pay much attention to the model itself in university and urban high schools.They scarcely do research in the rural high schools,and even more rarely on the problems in the implementation of CRT model.In view of this,this study is designed to investigate the effectiveness of the CRT model in high Schools,with a special focus on the identification of the problems in the process of implementing CRT.The study is mainly aimed at helping push forward necessary pedagogical reforms carried out in high Schools so that the CRT can be implemented effectively.The study centers around three questions:(1)To what extent is the CRT effective in comparison with the traditional teaching model?(2)What are the possible reasons for the differences between the CRT and traditional teaching?(3)If any,what are the problems in the process of the implementation of CRT in rural high schools?On the basis of the Constructive Learning Theory,Critical Discourse Analysis Theory and Wen Qiufang's two-level framework,combined with the sufficient researches home and abroad,the study operates an experiment which is designed by quantitative and qualitative approaches.For the quantitative part,tests and a questionnaire are the main research instruments.First of all,one-term teaching experiment is designed and conducted.The subjects of the study are 108 students from two classes of grade two of a certain rural senior high school.Both of the two classes participate in pretest and posttest.The two classes are grouped into control class(CC)and experimental class(EC)on the basis of the outcome of the pretest.The treatments are the CRT and traditional teaching used for experimental class and control class students respectively.Then at the end of term the data of post-test are collected and analyzed.Secondly,a questionnaire is given to the EC and CC.100 valid questionnaires are collected.For the qualitative part,interview and class observation are the main tools.In the survey of the class observation,the performances of both the teacher and the students are observed and recorded.In the interview,six students of three different levels(higher-level,intermediate-level and lower-level)are picked out to participate in it.According to the data collection and analysis,some major findings are as follows:First and foremost,as the results of independent-samples T-test on the scores of the posttest reveal,there is a significant difference in students' CT competence,particularly in the aspects of deducing,summarizing and telling the opinions.According to the results of paired-samples T-test of the reading strategies in details in both pretest and posttest,the improvement of the competence of deducing and summarizing has been further proved.So,it's found that compared to the traditional teaching,CRT model is more effective on cultivating students' CT competence.Secondly,the results of questionnaire indicate that significant difference are found between EC and CC in various aspects of students' beliefs,learning habits and learning motivation,which suggests that the CRT carried out in EC is more effective than the traditional teaching.The results of the interviews partially confirm the findings mentioned previously.Thirdly,the researcher's class observation,along with the results of interviews reveals that although CRT has been proved to be significantly effective,there exist a lot of problems and obstacles when implementing.They can be concluded from three aspects.(1)The teacher's factors:Rural school teachers' understanding of critical reading is not enough.In the process of teaching,the teacher doesn't have a good knowledge of the students' abilities,causing the teaching design not to meet the demands of students of different levels.The teacher steps up the teaching to finish all the tasks,but she has no awareness that it has a great negative effect on cultivating the students' CT abilities,because the students have insufficient time to think over.The teacher can't get rid of the traditional reading teaching model and continually over-emphasizes the words and grammar usage.(2)The students' factors:The students can't adapt to the new teaching model,lacking in learning autonomy.Some students are afraid of not completing the tasks perfectly,and considerable anxiety gradually arises from the increasing times and difficulties of the independent-thinking.(3)The environmental factors:The big size class seriously affects the results of implementing CRT.In rural senior high school,most students are boarders,who have less access to all kinds of learning resources.What's worse,the relatively poor hardware facilities of the school are another important factor.Besides,the whole school is lacking in a formative assessment.Therefore,the results of the study have instructive significance for high school teachers to teach appropriately and for high school students to learn effectively.From the perspective of the teachers,when implementing CRT,teachers should take the grammatical teaching and language points teaching into account in compensation for their lack of sufficient language knowledge in high schools.When the teacher designs the teaching procedures,students of different levels should be taken into consideration,especially the lower-level students,who always show great anxiety and heavy burden when accomplishing the assigned tasks.From the perspective of the learners,they should get involved in the class and adapt themselves to the CRT,thinking more,finding problems,analyzing and solving them independently.From the perspective of rural schools,they should change the phenomenon of teaching in large classes and improve the hardware facilities of the school so that students can make better use of resources and realize the maximum effect of critical reading teaching.In a word,CRT can not only reinforce the reading ability,but also lay a solid foundation for their creative study and job in the future,meeting the requirement that classes in high school should shift from teacher-centered to student-centered and the aim of the education should shift from exam to quality.