The Exploration Of English Continuation Tasks In Senior High School Oriented To The Cultivation Of Critical Thinking Ability

National English Curriculum Standards(2017 Edition)was promulgated by the Ministry of Education in 2017,which put forward that key competences were the value of English education with linguistic competence,cultural awareness,thinking quality and learning ability included.The focus on the thinking quality is dedicated to helping students improve their ability to analyze and solve problems and make correct judgments on things.However,it consequently follows higher requirements for English teaching in senior high schools.In other words,how English teachers can cultivate students' critical thinking ability as their English proficiency is developed at the same time is of great challenge and importance.In this regard,this paper integrates the cultivation of critical thinking ability with the continuation task.As a new method of writing,continuation tasks can examine students' writing skills but what should be mentioned is that critical thinking ability is highly demanding in the process of completion.For this purpose,tracking,investigating the writing process and further reflection and discussion on it are completely in line with the research.Besides,the significance of critical thinking ability in the process of continuation completion can be reflected to the greatest extent.This study intends to address the following three research questions:(1)What is the current situation of high school students' critical thinking ability?(2)How can students' critical thinking ability be developed through continuation tasks?(3)How has students' critical thinking ability developed after the targeted training in continuation tasks? What are the implications for the design of continuation tasks? To answer the questions,the study concurrently employs quantitative and qualitative methods.The former is the quasi-experimental research method.The hypotheses for this experiment are as follows.Students have certain critical thinking abilities in several aspects before the experiment.After targeted and systematic cultivation during continuation tasks,improvements have been seen on certain dimensions of students' critical thinking ability,which corresponds to the development of writing competence.The latter employs think-aloud protocols.Students report their real-time thoughts during the completion process of continuation tasks so that their thinking process can be analyzed qualitatively.This paper mainly uses the following measures to cultivate students' critical thinking ability in English continuation lessons.They are drawing storylines,question chains,mind mapping,and peer interaction,aiming to provide a practical teaching case for critical thinking cultivation in high school English teaching through activities above employed in continuation tasks.In this study,51 students from one senior high school in Shandong Province are involved in the ten-week continuation practice.The California Thinking Disposition Inventory-Chinese Version and the Qualitative Florida Scale for Critical Thinking Skills are employed respectively to test critical thinking dispositions and critical thinking skills before and after the experiment so that changes of students' critical thinking ability before and after the experiment are observed.In addition,the author probes into the correlation between critical thinking ability and writing competence through the contrast between writing scores of two monthly examinations before and after the experiment.Meanwhile,analysis of the transcribed recording during the continuation writing is conducted to explore the thinking process.The results reveal that students in senior one generally have a positive and even weak level of critical thinking ability;however,certain improvements in most affective dispositions and cognitive sub-dimensions have been observed after ten-week systematic training.In detail,three sub-dimensions of the seven critical thinking dispositions,i.e.systematicity,self-confidence and analyticity have been improved significantly while maturity and open-mindedness share the least significant growth.Except for self-regulation,the other five critical cognitive skills,namely,evaluation,analysis,interpretation,inference,and explanation all have been improved.What's more,through the comparison of the two monthly exams before and after the experiment,it is shown that evident significance is absent in the aspect of inference while the other five cognitive skills have significant changes.The result conforms to the analysis of critical thinking dispositions and skills.It shows that students' writing competence has a close relationship with the change of critical thinking ability.Corresponding to the finding of the quantitative method,it is found that students can apply six critical cognitive skills,namely,interpretation,analysis,evaluation,explanation,inference,and self-regulation unconsciously during continuation writing.As a result,critical thinking ability can be targeted to cultivate during the completion of continuation tasks in English lessons.In turn,the improvement of critical thinking ability can promote writing competence.